International Association
for Cryptologic Research

As a cryptographer and/or software developer you will transform the newest research ideas into practical applications. This role is highly technical and involves designing, implementing, and optimizing cryptographic primitives and protocols. We are looking for someone who enjoys deep technical challenges, has a decent understanding of modern cryptography, and takes pride in writing efficient and secure code. You will collaborate closely with researchers and engineers to bring new ideas from concept to production.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Furkan Turan

More information: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4314095801/

As a Senior GPU Acceleration Engineer, you will extend Belfort’s cryptographic acceleration technology into high-performance GPU platforms. You will lead efforts in adapting and optimizing our algorithms for modern GPU architectures, ensuring maximum throughput, scalability, and energy efficiency.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Furkan Turan

More information: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4314224579/

We are continuously looking for PhD students for the 6-year project CAVE, funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) through the Emmy Noether Programme. During your PhD, you will be working on cutting-edge research in Hardware Security Engineering and Verification.

Deadline: Reviewing of applications will continue until positions are filled.

Why should you apply? The position involves exploring innovative methods in the field of Computer-Aided Security Engineering and Verification, with the goal of publishing in leading international venues, broadening the research network, initiating global collaborations, and formulating independent research inquiries. For this, I work closely with my PhD students, including regular one-to-one meetings, to support and foster your research.

Location: The newly established junior research group on Computer-Aided Verification of Physical Security Properties (CAVE) is affiliated with the Horst Goertz Institute for IT Security (HGI) and the Faculty of Computer Science at Ruhr University Bochum (RUB). RUB has been a leader in IT security in Europe for more than two decades, and this expertise is integral to the HGI and the Faculty of Computer Science.

Requirements: A Master’s Degree or a strong Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related fields. Excellent interpersonal and communication skills in English as well as solid background in any of the following fields are expected: cryptographic engineering, hardware security, physical implementation attacks (SCA & FIA), or profound knowledge of formal verification techniques.

Application: If you are interested in applying, please send an email to Dr. Pascal Sasdrich (pascal.sasdrich@rub.de) with the following documents in a single PDF (max. 10 MB) and subject line "[CAVE] Application for PhD position":

• Your CV, including a transcript of records.
• A brief cover letter describing your research interests.
• Contact details of 2-3 potential references.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Dr. Pascal Sasdrich

IIT Hyderabad invites applications from exceptionally bright and motivated qualified candidates for faculty positions at the levels of Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, in specializations including cryptography and privacy, systems security, post-quantum cryptography, quantum cryptography, and cyber security.

For more details, please refer to the advertisement: https://iith.ac.in/assets/files/careers/faculty/Faculty-Recruitment-Advt-Oct2025.pdf.

For more details about the department, please visit https://cse.iith.ac.in/.

To apply please use the link: https://faculty.recruitment.iith.ac.in/index1.html.

The deadline is 5.30 pm (IST) on 31 October 2025.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: For any questions please reach out to Maria Francis (mariaf@cse.iith.ac.in).

The Applied Cryptography Group at Technical University of Darmstadt offers a fully funded postdoc position. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) distributed cryptography, anonymous credentials, blockchain protocols, multiparty computation, zero-knowledge and more. You will conduct research and publish/present the results at top venues for research in cryptography and IT Security. The position is to be filled as soon as possible for initially 2 years with the possibility of an extension.

Your profile:

• Completed PhD degree (or equivalent) at a top university in IT security, computer science, mathematics, electrical engineering, or a similar area.
• Publications at top venues for IT security and cryptography (e.g., EUROCRYPT, CRYPTO, ASIACRYPT, S&P, CCS, TCC),
• Good knowledge in one of the topics mentioned above is a plus.
• Experience in project management and supervising students is a plus.

Your application should contain a CV, list of publications, a short research statement and at least one contact for a reference letter.

TU Darmstadt is a top research university for IT Security, Cryptography, and Computer Science in Europe. We offer an excellent working environment in the heart of the Frankfurt Metropolitan Area, which is internationally well-known for its high quality of life. The review of applications starts immediately until the position is filled.

Please send your application to: job@cac.tu-darmstadt.de

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Sebastian Faust

More information: https://www.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/cac/cac/index.en.jsp

We are looking for a junior research fellow for the project "A Post-Quantum Secure ZKP-based Authentication Protocol for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles". The candidate should have M.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering or related disciplines. Prior experience on cryptography and Zero-Knowledge-Proofs systems along with a solid background in programming is essential and will be preferred. Interested candidates can email to Dr. Raghvendra Rohit at raghvendra.rohit@cs.iitr.ac.in with their resume.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Dr. Raghvendra Rohit (raghvendra.rohit@cs.iitr.ac.in)

PhD Opportunities at the National University of Singapore (NUS). The candidates will have opportunities to work at NUS. Requirements for a PhD. Position • Completed Master’s degree (or equivalent) at a top university in information security, computer science, applied mathematics, electrical engineering, or a similar area • Research experience (such as publishing papers as a first author in reputable venues) • Self-motivated, reliable, creative, can work in a team and want to do excellent research on challenging scientific problems with practical relevance. Desire to publish at top venues (CORE rank A*/A) for information security/applied cryptography (e.g., TDSC, TIFS, S&P, CCS, NDSS, USENIX SEC), ideally on security protocols and secure computation How to apply? Please send me your CV with detailed information. Contact: Dr Prosanta Gope (p.gope@sheffield.ac.uk) Closing date for applications:

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Dr Prosanta Gope (p.gope@sheffield.ac.uk)

The a16z crypto research lab is seeking interns for summer 2026 in all technical areas pertaining to blockchains/Web3, including in particular cryptography and distributed computing. For more details and to submit an application, see https://a16z.com/about/jobs/?gh_jid=7489894003. For full consideration, please apply by November 10, 2025.

The Role

a16z crypto research is a new kind of multidisciplinary lab that bridges the worlds of academic theory and industry practice to advance the science and technology of the next generation of the internet. In addition to fundamental research, we collaborate with portfolio companies to solve hard technical and conceptual problems. Research interns will have the opportunity to learn from the firm’s investment and engineering teams, although this is a research role with no responsibility for investment decisions. We are seeking students with a strong research background and an interest in blockchains and web3 to join the group for the summer. Specific research areas of interest include cryptography, security, distributed computing, economics (both micro and macro), incentives, quantitative finance, political science and governance, and market and mechanism design. This list is not exhaustive and we encourage applicants with different backgrounds who may have unique perspectives on the space to apply.

Preferred Qualifications

• Enrolled in a PhD program in a relevant field such as computer science, economics, mathematics, operations research, political science, etc. (Exceptional masters and undergraduate students will also be considered.)
• Passionate and knowledgeable about blockchains/Web3 and their underlying technologies.
• Familiar with fundamental research and publishing in peer-reviewed conferences and journals.

Internship Details

• In-person residency required in New York, NY
• Duration: June 2–August 21, 2026 (min 10, max 12 weeks)

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Ertem Nusret Tas - ntas@a16z.com

More information: https://a16z.com/about/jobs/?gh_jid=7489894003

We are looking for a motivated candidate for a PhD position on multi-factor authentication protocols. The student will be part of the SCAMPER project team. The research will include design and implementation of novel multi-factor authentication protocols using advanced cryptographic techniques such as MPC, Anonymous Credential, in combination with biometric template protection methods. The student will collaborate closely with academic and industrial partners. Responsibilities • Design efficient protocols for multifactor authentication including fuzzy authentication factors • Perform security analysis and evaluations • Collaborate with industry stakeholders The candidate must hold a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or Mathematics, have good grades and a keen interest in cryptography. We prefer candidates who can demonstrate that they have developed their research skills during their Master’s studies. Strong background on the following is required: • Mathematics, including Probability and Statistics • Coding Theory • Programming skills • It would also be considered as a merit to have some background in cryptography

Closing date for applications:

Contact: jobs-cosic@esat.kuleuven.be

More information: https://www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/vacancies/

CISPA is a world-leading research center that focuses on Information Security and Machine Learning at large. To expand and further strengthen our center, we are looking for

Tenure-Track Faculty in all areas related to Information Security (f/m/d)

All applicants are expected to grow a research team that pursues an internationally visible research agenda. To aid you in achieving this, CISPA provides institutional base funding for three full-time researcher positions and a generous budget for expenditures. Upon successful tenure evaluation, you will hold a position that is equivalent to an endowed full professorship at a top research university. We invite applications of candidates with excellent track records in all areas related to Information Security.

CISPA values diversity and is committed to equality. We provide special dual-career support. We explicitly encourage female and diverse researchers to apply.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Scientific Talent Acquisition Team: career@cispa.de

More information: https://career.cispa.de/jobs/tenure-track-faculty-in-all-areas-related-to-information-security-f-m-d-2025-2026-74

Position Summary:
The Department of Mathematics & Statistics at Florida Atlantic University invites applications for a tenure-track position at the rank of Assistant or Associate Professor in cryptology, starting in August 2026. Strong candidates in all areas of cryptology will be considered. Preference will be given to candidates with several broad areas of interest in the mathematics of cybersecurity including, but not limited to, symmetric and public-key cryptography, post-quantum cryptography, quantum algorithms in cryptography, or a closely related area. Responsibilities for this position will be research, teaching, and professional service. The successful candidate is expected to apply for and secure external research funding and actively participate in interdisciplinary programs.

The Department of Mathematics & Statistics is a collegial and research-active department demonstrating excellence in teaching, research, and service. We are home to 26 tenure-track or tenured faculty members, 18 faculty members in non-tenure-track positions, and more than 40 graduate teaching/research assistants. Our department has an established national and international reputation for research innovation through our Center for Cryptology and Information Security (CCIS). FAU is also recognized as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance/Cyber Defense Research (CAE-R) since 2019. More information about the department can be found at: http://www.math.fau.edu/.

Review of applications will begin November 15, 2025, and will continue until the position is filled.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Informal inquiries can be addressed to: Dr. Stephen C. Locke, Chair of the Search Committee, (lockes@fau.edu)

More information: https://fau.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/FAU/details/Assistant-Associate-Professor--Cryptology_REQ21084

Functional Encryption (FE) is a concept that generalizes public-key encryption, allowing a party that owns a private key to find a function of the plaintext (instead of the plaintext itself). Multi-Party Functional Encryption (MPFE) generalizes this concept and adapts it to multi-party settings, allowing for decentralization in both the ciphertexts—which might originate from multiple sources—and the keys—thereby eliminating the necessity of a central authority and avoiding the introduction of a single point of trust and failure. The current paper presents a substantial foundation of MPFE to the non-specialist reader. It provides definitions, classifications, and discusses properties of MPFE and its relation with other cryptographic concepts. The potential applicability of MPFE, which covers multiple domains and use cases, is discussed. The paper investigates the real-world adoption of MPFE, including its presence in technical specifications or its availability in open-source libraries. Finally, the current study discusses challenges and therefore opens up new research directions.

The Swiss Post voting system is one of the most advanced cryptographic voting protocols deployed for political elections, offering end-to-end verifiability and vote privacy. It provides significant documentation and independent scrutiny reports. Still, we argue that two significant pillars of trust need to be further developed. One is formal verification accompanied by machine-checked proofs. The second is security in presence of a corrupt setup component. In this work, we propose formal specifications of a simplified version of the Swiss Post voting protocol and initial verification results with the Tamarin prover. We also propose a revised protocol design that mitigates risks from a corrupt setup, and a prototype implementation of necessary zero-knowledge proofs.

We introduce a new primitive, called beholder signatures, which, in some sense, are the opposite of blind signatures. In a beholder signature, one signs a commitment to a (potentially very long) message, and the signature attests that the parties participating in the signing process who know the secret key, jointly also know the entire committed message. This guarantee holds even against distributed adversaries that use secure multi-party computation (MPC) to produce the signature. We work in the distributed adversarial model (Dziembowski, Faust, and Lizurej, Crypto'23), where one assumes that it is infeasible to evaluate a large number of hash queries without any of the participating parties learning the input. We propose a construction of beholder signatures in the random oracle model. The starting point of our construction is proofs of complete knowledge, recently proposed by (Kelkar et al. CCS'24), which again build on Fischlin's transformation of a sigma protocol to a noninteractive, straight-line extractable zero-knowledge proof of knowledge. Our scheme is concretely efficient and comes with a proof-of-concept implementation using Schnorr as the underlying sigma protocol.

The primary applications of beholder signatures can be found within the blockchain ecosystem. In particular, we describe how to use them to construct proofs of custody (Feist, 2021) that do not require ephemeral keys and are noninteractive. We also outline applications to data dissemination, data availability, and proofs of replication.

Feature snooping has been shown to be very effective for stealing cost-sensitive models executing on neural processing units. Existing model obfuscation defenses protect the weights directly, but do not protect the features that hold information on the weights in indirect form. This paper proposes CoupledNets, the first model obfuscation defense that protects the intermediate features during inference. The obfuscation is performed during the training phase, by injecting noise, customized on the theme of neuron coupling, so as to make cryptanalysis mathematically impossible during the inference phase. When implemented across a wide range of neural network architectures and datasets, on average, CoupledNets demonstrated > 80% drop in the accuracy of the obfuscated model, with little impact on the functional accuracy and training times.

Non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proofs tend to be randomized and there are many possible proofs for any fixed NP statement. Can we have NIZKs with only a single unique valid proof per statement? Such NIZKs are known under strong cryptographic assumptions (indistinguishability obfuscation), and are conversely known to require strong cryptographic assumptions (witness encryption). In this work, following Lepinski, Micali, and shelat (TCC '05), we consider the following relaxed notion of unique NIZKs (UNIZKs): - We only require (computationally) unique proofs for NP statements with a (computationally) unique witness; an adversary that can produce two distinct proofs must also know two distinct witnesses. - We consider NIZKs with prover setup, where a potentially malicious prover initially publishes a public key $\mathsf{pk}$ and keeps a corresponding secret key $\mathsf{sk}$, which it uses to produce arbitrarily many NIZK proofs $\pi$ in the future. While the public key $\mathsf{pk}$ is not required to be unique, once it is fixed, all the subsequent proofs $\pi$ that the prover can produce should be unique. We show that both of these relaxations are needed to avoid witness encryption. Prior work constructed such UNIZKs under the quadratic residuosity assumption, and it remained an open problem to do so under any other assumptions. Here, we give a new construction of UNIZKs under the learning with errors (LWE) assumption. We also identify and fix a subtle circularity issue in the prior work. UNIZKs are a non-interactive version of steganography-free zero-knowledge of Abdolmaleki et al. (TCC '22). As an application of UNIZKs, we get a general steganography detection mechanism that can passively monitor arbitrary functionalities to detect steganographic leakage.

In recent years, numerous new and more efficient constructions of zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge (zkSNARK) have been proposed, motivated by their growing practical applications. However, in most schemes, when the witness is changed, the prover has to recompute the proof from scratch even if the new witness is close to the old one. This is inefficient for applications where proofs are generated for dynamically changing witnesses with small changes.

In this paper, we introduce DYNARK, a dynamic zkSNARK scheme that can update the proof in sublinear time when the change of the witness is small. DYNARK is built on top of the seminal zkSNARK protocol of Groth, 2016. In the semi-dynamic setting, for an R1CS of size $n$, after a preprocessing of $O(n\log n)$ group operations on the original witness, it only takes $O(d)$ group operations and $O(d\log^2 d)$ field operations to update the proof for a new witness with distance $d$ from the original witness, which is nearly optimal. In the fully-dynamic setting, the update time of DYNARK is $O(d\sqrt{n\log n})$ group operations and $O(d\log^2 d)$ field operations. Both the proof size and the verifier time are $O(1)$, which are exactly the same as Groth16. Compared to the scheme in a prior work by Wang et al. 2024, we reduce the proof size from $O(\sqrt{n})$ to $O(1)$ without relying on pairing product arguments or another zkSNARK, and the update time and the verifier time of DYNARK are faster in practice.

Experimental results show that for $n=2^{20}$, after a one-time preprocessing of 74.3 seconds, it merely takes 3 milliseconds to update the proof in our semi-dynamic zkSNARK for $d=1$, and 60 milliseconds to update the proof in our fully-dynamic zkSNARK. These are 1433$\times$ and 73$\times$ faster than Groth16, respectively. The proof size is 192 bytes and the verifier time is 4.4 milliseconds. The system is fully compatible with any existing deployment of Groth16 without changing the trusted setup, the proof and the verification algorithm.

In this short paper we present an approach to computable contracts, where all roles in a computation may be outsourced, from the servers performing computations, to those providing input, to those performing verifications (on input and on output), including all related communications. Varying levels of confidentiality can be chosen, both on data and calculations. While the largest part of the computational and communication effort is performed off-chain, our contracts require a specialized underlying blockchain, where they are encoded as transactions, to achieve their decentralized handling and thus enforcing their correct execution via a combination of cryptographic techniques and economic security. Our delegation architecture allows for the execution of very complex collaborative tasks, such as the deployment of an AI marketplace.

MQOM is one of the fourteen remaining candidates in the second round of the NIST post-quantum signature standardization process. Introduced in 2023, MQOM instantiates the Multi-Party Computation in the Head (MPCitH) paradigm over the well-established hard problem of solving Multivariate Quadratic (MQ) equations. In this paper, we present the first fault attacks on MQOM targeting the MQ evaluation phase, which is a central component of the algorithm. We introduce four differential fault attacks and demonstrate their effectiveness against both unprotected and masked implementations. The first two target the secret key using a random fault model, making them particularly realistic and practical. With as little as one or two injected faults, depending on the variant, the entire secret key can be recovered through linear algebra. The other two attacks exploit faults on the coefficients of the MQ system directly. Our results highlight that the MQ evaluation, despite not being identified as a sensitive component until now, can be exploited using just a few fault injections.

We introduce Bounded-Equivocable PRFs, a new variant of pseudorandom functions. They combine standard pseudorandomness with a bounded form of programmability. In our model, an adversary may issue an arbitrary number of queries that remain indistinguishable from random. Bounded equivocability ensures that responses can be programmed consistently with a later-revealed key, up to a fixed bound q. This relaxation avoids known impossibility results, which preclude polynomial unbounded equivocability in the standard model, while preserving the programmability required for applications.

We present standard-model constructions of bounded-equivocable PRFs under the DDH and LWE assumptions, and we show how to make these constructions verifiable. Prior SIM-AC style primitives could not achieve verifiability since their programmability relied on embedding the secret key into the random oracle.

We demonstrate applications to (i) adaptively secure private-key encryption, (ii) two-round threshold Schnorr signatures secure against adaptive corruptions, and (iii) leader election in Proof of Stake blockchains. Together, these results establish bounded-equivocable PRFs as a practical primitive that achieves programmability with verifiability in the standard model, and enables applications previously out of reach.