International Association for Cryptologic Research

IACR News Central

Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:

Now viewing news items related to:

20 June 2017
In the present day, AES is one the most widely used and most secure Encryption Systems prevailing. So, naturally lots of research work is going on to mount a significant attack on AES. Many different forms of Linear and differential cryptanalysis have been performed on AES. Of late, an active area of research has been Algebraic Cryptanalysis of AES, where although fast progress is being made, there are still numerous scopes for research and improvement. One of the major reasons behind this being that algebraic cryptanalysis mainly depends on I/O relations of the AES S- Box (a major component of the AES). As, already known, that the key recovery algorithm of AES can be broken down as an MQ problem which is itself considered hard. Solving these equations depends on our ability reduce them into linear forms which are easily solvable under our current computational prowess. The lower the degree of these equations, the easier it is for us to linearlize hence the attack complexity reduces. The aim of this paper is to analyze the various relations involving small number of monomials of the AES S- Box and to answer the question whether it is actually possible to have such monomial equations for the S- Box if we restrict the degree of the monomials. In other words this paper aims to study such equations and see if they can be applicable for AES.
In CRYPTO 2017, Mennink and Neves showed almost n-bit security for a dual version of EWCDM. In this paper we describe a birthday attack on this construction which violates their claim.
ePrint Report TLS-N: Non-repudiation over TLS Enabling - Ubiquitous Content Signing for Disintermediation Hubert Ritzdorf, Karl Wüst, Arthur Gervais, Guillaume Felley, Srdjan Capkun
An internet user wanting to share observed content is typically restricted to primitive techniques such as screenshots, web caches or share button-like solutions. These acclaimed proofs, however, are either trivial to falsify or require trust in centralized entities (e.g., search engine caches).

This motivates the need for a seamless and standardized internet-wide non-repudiation mechanism, allowing users to share data from news sources, social websites or financial data feeds in a provably secure manner.

Additionally, blockchain oracles that enable data-rich smart contracts typically rely on a trusted third party (e.g., TLSNotary or Intel SGX). A decentralized method to transfer web-based content into a permissionless blockchain without additional trusted third party would allow for smart contract applications to flourish.

In this work, we present TLS-N, the first TLS extension that provides secure non-repudiation and solves both of the mentioned challenges. TLS-N generates non-interactive proofs about the content of a TLS session that can be efficiently verified by third parties and blockchain based smart contracts. As such, TLS-N increases the accountability for content provided on the web and enables a practical and decentralized blockchain oracle for web content. TLS-N is compatible with TLS 1.3 and adds a minor overhead to a typical TLS session. When a proof is generated, parts of the TLS session (e.g., passwords, cookies) can be hidden for privacy reasons, while the remaining content can be verified.

Practical demonstrations can be found at https://tls-n.org/.
ePrint Report Boot Attestation: Secure Remote Reporting with Off-The-Shelf IoT Sensors Steffen Schulz, André Schaller, Florian Kohnhäuser, Stefan Katzenbeisser
A major challenge in computer security is about establishing the trustworthiness of remote platforms. Remote attestation is the most common approach to this challenge. It allows a remote platform to measure and report its system state in a secure way to a third party. Unfortunately, existing attestation solutions either provide low security, as they rely on unrealistic assumptions, or are not applicable to commodity low-cost and resource-constrained devices, as they require custom secure hardware extensions that are difficult to adopt across IoT vendors. In this work, we propose a novel remote attestation scheme, named Boot Attestation, that is particularly optimized for low-cost and resource-constrained embedded devices. In Boot Attestation, software integrity measurements are immediately committed to during boot, thus relaxing the traditional requirement for secure storage and reporting. Our scheme is very light on cryptographic requirements and storage, allowing efficient implementations, even on the most low-end IoT platforms available today. We also describe extensions for more flexible management of ownership and third party (public-key) attestation that may be desired in fully Internet-enabled devices. Our scheme is supported by many existing off-the-shelf devices. To this end, we review the hardware protection capabilities for a number of popular device types and present implementation results for two such commercially available platforms.
In the present paper, we analyze the security of SIMON-like ciphers against linear cryptanalysis. First, an upper bound is derived on the squared correlation of SIMON-like round function. It is shown that the upper bound on the squared correlation of SIMON-like round function decreases with the Hamming weight of output mask increasing. Based on this, we derive an upper bound on the squared correlation of linear trails for SIMON and SIMECK, which is $2^{-2R+2}$ for any $R$-round linear trail. We also extend this upper bound to SIMON-like ciphers. Meanwhile, an automatic search algorithm is proposed, which can find the optimal linear trails in SIMON-like ciphers under the Markov assumption. With the proposed algorithm, we find the provably optimal linear trails for $12$, $16$, $19$, $28$ and $37$ rounds of SIMON$32/48/64/96/128$. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that the provably optimal linear trails for SIMON$64$, SIMON$96$ and SIMON$128$ are reported. The provably optimal linear trails for $13$, $19$ and $25$ rounds of SIMECK$32/48/64$ are also found respectively. Besides the optimal linear trails, we also find the $23$, $31$ and $41$-round linear hulls for SIMON$64/96/128$, and $13$, $21$ and $27$-round linear hulls for SIMECK$32/48/64$. As far as we know, these are the best linear hull distinguishers for SIMON and SIMECK so far. Compared with the approach based on SAT/SMT solvers in \cite{KolblLT15}, our search algorithm is more efficient and practical to evaluate the security against linear cryptanalysis in the design of SIMON-like ciphers.
We study the quantum query complexity of finding a collision for a function $f$ whose outputs are chosen according to a non-uniform distribution $D$. We derive some upper bounds and lower bounds depending on the min-entropy and the collision-entropy of $D$. In particular, we improve the previous lower bound by Ebrahimi, Tabia, and Unruh from $\Omega(2^{k/9})$ to $\Omega(2^{k/5})$ where $k$ is the min-entropy of $D$.
ePrint Report A Secure User Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for HWSN Tailored for the Internet of Things Environment Hamidreza Yazdanpanah, Mohammadreza Hasani Ahangar, Mahdi Azizi, Arash Ghafouri
Internet of things (IOT) is the term used to describe a world in which the things interact with other things through internet connection or communication means, share the information together and or people and deliver a new class of capabilities, application and services; the world in which all things and heterogeneous devices are addressable and controllable. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) play an important role in such an environment, since they include a wide application field. Researchers are already working on how to integrate WSN better into the IoT environment. One aspect of it is the security aspect of the integration. In 2014, Turkanovi´c proposed a lightweight user authentication and key agreement protocol for heterogeneous WSN(HWSN) based on the internet of things concept. In this scheme, remote user can access a single desired sensor node from the WSN without the necessity of firstly connecting with a gateway node (GWN). Moreover, this scheme is lightweight because it based on a simple symmetric cryptography and it uses simple hash and XOR computations. Turkanovi´c et al.'s scheme had some security shortages and it was susceptible to some security attacks. Recently Sabzinejad Farash et al. proposed an efficient user authentication and key agreement scheme for HWSN tailored for the Internet of Things environment based on Turkanovi´c et al.'s scheme. Although their scheme is efficient, we found out that this scheme is vulnerable to some cryptographic attacks. In this paper, we demonstrate some security weaknesses of the Sabzinejad Farash et al.’s scheme and then we propose an improved and secure mutual authentication and key agreement scheme.
16 June 2017
Event date: 13 October to 15 October 2017
The Hardware Security group at Virginia Tech has an open position for a post-doctoral scholar in energy-efficient cryptography, in support of recent new projects. The Internet of Things needs a huge amount of tiny computers, and many of them will be powered in a sustainable manner, such as through harvested energy sources. The project objective is to investigate and demonstrate how such energy-constrained devices can support secure and full Internet connectivity.

We are looking for a candidate with the following qualifications.

• Solid background in cryptographic engineering, covering protocols and algorithms.
• Experience with development of embedded software and/or hardware, including toolchain and design methodology.
• Effective communicator and team leader for a group of PhD students.
• Experience with energy harvesting technologies, intermittently powered computers and design across the hardware/software interface is a plus.

The Hardware Security group at Virginia Tech covers design, optimization and tamper-resistant implementation of cryptographic protocols and related applications. Recent projects include a fault-resistant microprocessor ASIC, side-channel resistant software synthesis, and novel primitives for hardware security.

To apply send your CV to the contact below. Include your publication list, a statement of research interest and objectives, and contact information for two references. Applications will be reviewed on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Closing date for applications: 30 September 2017

Contact: Prof. Patrick Schaumont (schaum (at) vt.edu)

Job Posting Ph. D. students Unviversity of Bergen
The University of Bergen in Norway is currently seeking candidates for four open positions as Ph.D. students. The advertised field of research for the positions is computer security, but we are particularly interested in good candidates in cryptography.

Closing date for applications: 1 July 2017

or

Tor Helleseth, Professor, Dept. of Informatics, email: Tor.Helleseth (at) ii.uib.no

Job Posting Ph.D. / M.Sc. Scholarships, PostDoc Positions Cryptography, Security, and Privacy Research Group, Koç University, ?stanbul, Turkey
Cryptography, Security & Privacy Research Group at Koç University has multiple openings at every level. All accepted applicants will receive competitive scholarships including tuition waiver, housing, monthly stipend, computer, travel support, etc.

https://crypto.ku.edu.tr/join

• For applying online, and questions about the application-process for M.Sc. and Ph.D. positions, visit

All applications must be completed online with all the required documents. Deadline is end of June.

• For postdoctoral researcher positions, contact Asst. Prof. Alptekin Küpçü directly, including full CV, sample publications, a research proposal, and 2-3 reference letters sent directly by the referees. Application and starting dates are flexible.

http://home.ku.edu.tr/~akupcu

Closing date for applications: 31 August 2017

Contact: gsse (at) ku.edu.tr

14 June 2017
ePrint Report Ouroboros Praos: An adaptively-secure, semi-synchronous proof-of-stake protocol Bernardo David, Peter Ga{\v{z}}i, Aggelos Kiayias, Alexander Russell
We present “Ouroboros Praos”, a new proof-of-stake blockchain protocol that provides, for the first time, a robust distributed ledger that is provably secure in the semi-synchronous adversarial setting, i.e., assuming a delay \Delta in message delivery which is unknown to protocol participants, and fully adaptively secure, i.e., the adversary can choose to corrupt any participant of an ever evolving population of stakeholders at any moment as long the stakeholder distribution maintains an honest majority of stake at any given time. To achieve that, our protocol puts to use forward secure digital signatures and a new type of verifiable random functions that maintains unpredictability under malicious key generation, a property we introduce and instantiate in the random oracle model. Our security proof entails a combinatorial analysis of a class of forkable strings tailored to semi-synchronous blockchains that may be of independent interest in the context of security analysis of blockchain protocols.
ePrint Report MXPUF: Secure PUF Design against State-of-the-art Modeling Attacks Phuong Ha Nguyen, Durga Prasad Sahoo, Chenglu Jin, Kaleel Mahmood, Marten van Dijk
Silicon Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have been proposed as an emerging hardware security primitive in various security applications such as device identification, authentication, and cryptographic key generation. Current so-called `strong' PUFs, which allow a large challenge response space, are compositions of Arbiter PUFs (APUFs), e.g. the $x$-XOR APUF. Wide-scale deployment of state-of-the-art compositions of APUFs, however, has stagnated due to various mathematical and physical attacks leading to software models that break the unclonability property of PUFs. The current state-of-the-art attack by Becker, CHES 2015, shows that the XOR APUF can be broken by modeling its APUF components separately thanks to CMA-ES, a machine learning algorithm, based on reliability information of measured XOR APUF responses. Thus, it is an important problem to design a strong PUF which can resist not only traditional modeling attacks but also Becker's attack. In this paper, we propose a new strong PUF design called $(x,y)$-MXPUF, which consists of two layers; the upper layer is an $n$-bit $x$-XOR APUF, and the lower layer is an $(n+1)$-bit $y$-XOR APUF. The response of $x$-XOR APUF for an $n$-bit challenge $\mathbf{c}$ in the upper layer is inserted at the middle of $\mathbf{c}$ to construct a new $(n+1)$-bit challenge for the $y$-XOR APUF in the lower layer giving the final response bit of the $(x,y)$-MXPUF. The reliability of $(x,y)$-MXPUF can be theoretically and experimentally shown to be twice the reliability of $(x+y)$-XOR PUF. In the context of traditional modeling attacks, when we keep the same hardware size, the security of $(x,y)$-MXPUF is only slightly weaker than that of $(x+y)$-XOR PUF. Our main contribution proves that the $(x,y)$-MXPUF is secure against Becker's attack.
There is a recent trend in cryptography to construct protocols based on the hardness of computing isogenies between supersingular elliptic curves. Two prominent examples are Jao-De Feo's key exchange protocol and the resulting encryption scheme by De Feo-Jao-Plût. One particularity of the isogeny problems underlying these protocols is that some additional information is given in input, namely the image of some torsion points with order coprime to the isogeny. This additional information was used in several active attacks against the protocols but the current best passive attacks on the protocols make no use of it at all.

In this paper, we provide new algorithms that exploit the additional information provided in isogeny protocols to speed up the resolution of the underlying problems. Our techniques lead to a heuristic polynomial-time key recovery on a non-standard variant of De Feo-Jao-Plût's protocols in a plausible attack model. This shows that at least some isogeny problems are easier to solve when additional information is leaked.
This paper presents the findings of an independent security review of SpiderOak ONE, a popular encrypted cloud storage application. In this application, the storage provider claims that, since all the users' data is password encrypted and the password never leaves the client, even the storage provider cannot learn any information about the users' data.

After providing a formal description of the key design choices in the reviewed application (e.g., how user's accounts are registered, how new devices are registered, how and what cryptographic keys are used, how file encryption is handled, etc.), we present a number of vulnerabilities that can be exploited by a malicious storage server to break, to different degrees, the confidentiality of the users' password and therefore the users' data.

Our findings have been communicated to SpiderOak in April 2017. The vendor promptly replied to our concerns by releasing an updated version of the application (v. 6.3.0, June 2017) which resolves most of the issues described in this paper.
Secure multi-party computation allows a number of participants to securely evaluate a function on their private inputs and has a growing number of applications. Two standard adversarial models that treat the participants as semi-honest or malicious, respectively, are normally considered for showing security of constructions in this framework. In this work, we go beyond the standard security model in the presence of malicious participants and treat the problem of enforcing correct inputs to be entered into the computation. We achieve this by having a certification authority certify user’s information, which is consequently used in secure two-party computation based on garbled circuit evaluation. The focus of this work on enforcing correctness of garbler’s inputs via certification, as prior work already allows one to achieve this goal for circuit evaluator’s input. Thus, in this work, we put forward a novel approach for certifying user’s input and tying certification to garbler’s input used during secure function evaluation based on garbled circuits. Our construction achieves notable performance of adding only one (standard) signature verification and O(n&#961;) symmetric key/hash operations to the cost of garbled circuit evaluation in the malicious model via cut-and-choose, in which &#961; circuits are garbled and n is the length of the garbler’s input in bits. Security of our construction is rigorously proved in the standard model.
ePrint Report Towards Doubly Efficient Private Information Retrieval Ran Canetti, Justin Holmgren, Silas Richelson
Private Information Retrieval (PIR) allows a client to obtain data from a public database without disclosing the locations accessed. Traditionally, the stress is on preserving sublinear work for the client, while the server's work is taken to inevitably be at least linear in the database size. Beimel, Ishai and Malkin (JoC 2004) show PIR schemes where, following a linear-work preprocessing stage, the server's work per query is sublinear in the database size. However, that work only addresses the case of multiple non-colluding servers; the existence of single-server PIR with sublinear server work remained unaddressed.

We consider single-server PIR schemes where, following a preprocessing stage in which the server obtains an encoded version of the database and the client obtains a short key, the per-query work of both server and client is polylogarithmic in the database size. We call such schemes {\em doubly efficient}. Concentrating on the case where the client's key is secret, we show:

- A scheme, based on one-way functions, that works for a bounded number of queries, and where the server storage is linear in the number of queries plus the database size.

- A scheme for an unbounded number of queries, whose security follows from a new hardness assumption that is related to the hardness of solving a system of noisy linear equations.

We also show the insufficiency of a natural approach for obtaining doubly efficient PIR in the setting where the preprocessing is public.
ePrint Report Can We Access a Database Both Locally and Privately? Elette Boyle, Yuval Ishai, Rafael Pass, Mary Wootters
We consider the following strong variant of private information retrieval (PIR). There is a large database x that we want to make publicly available. To this end, we post an encoding X of x together with a short public key pk in a publicly accessible repository. The goal is to allow any client who comes along to retrieve a chosen bit x_i by reading a small number of bits from X, whose positions may be randomly chosen based on i and pk, such that even an adversary who can fully observe the access to X does not learn information about i.

Towards solving the above problem, we study a weaker secret key variant where the data is encoded and accessed by the same party. This primitive, that we call an oblivious locally decodable code (OLDC), is independently motivated by applications such as searchable sym- metric encryption. We reduce the public-key variant of PIR to OLDC using an ideal form of obfuscation that can be instantiated heuristically with existing indistinguishability obfuscation candidates, or alternatively implemented with small and stateless tamper-proof hardware.

Finally, a central contribution of our work is the first proposal of an OLDC candidate. Our candidate is based on a secretly permuted Reed-Muller code. We analyze the security of this candidate against several natural attacks and leave its further study to future work.
ePrint Report Zero-Knowledge Contingent Payments Revisited: Attacks and Payments for Services Matteo Campanelli, Rosario Gennaro, Steven Goldfeder, Luca Nizzardo
Zero Knowledge Contingent Payment (ZKCP) protocols allow fair exchange of sold goods and payments over the Bitcoin network. In this paper we point out two main shortcomings of current proposals for ZKCP.

First we show an attack that allows a buyer to learn partial information about the digital good being sold, without paying for it. This break in the zero-knowledge condition of ZKCP is due to the fact that in the protocols we attack, the buyer is allowed to choose common parameters that normally should be selected by a trusted third party.

We present ways to fix this attack that do not require a trusted third party.

Second, we show that ZKCP are not suited for the purchase of digital services rather than goods. Current constructions of ZKCP do not allow a seller to receive payments after proving that a certain service has been rendered, but only for the sale of a specific digital good. We define the notion of Zero-Knowledge Contingent Service Payment (ZKCSP) protocols and construct two new protocols, for either public or private verification.

We implemented and tested the attack on ZKCP, and our two new ZKCSP protocols, showing their feasibility for very realistic examples. We present code that learns, without paying, the value of a Sudoku cell in the "Pay-to-Sudoku" ZKCP implementation [17]. We also implement ZKCSP protocols for the case of Proof of Retrievability, where a client pays the server for providing a proof that the client's data is correctly stored by the server. A side product of our implementation effort is a new optimized circuit for SHA256 with less than a quarter than the number of AND gates of the best previously publicly available one. Our new SHA256 circuit may be of independent use for circuit-based MPC and FHE protocols that require SHA256 circuits.
ePrint Report A Formal Foundation for Secure Remote Execution of Enclaves Pramod Subramanyan, Rohit Sinha, Ilia Lebedev, Srinivas Devadas, Sanjit Seshia
Recent proposals for trusted hardware platforms, such as Intel SGX and the MIT Sanctum processor, offer compelling security features but lack formal guarantees. We introduce a verification methodology based on a trusted abstract platform (TAP) that formally models idealized enclaves and a parameterized adversary. We present machine-checked proofs showing that the TAP satisfies the three key security properties needed for secure remote execution: integrity, confidentiality and secure measurement. We then present machine-checked proofs showing that SGX and Sanctum are refinements of the TAP under certain parameterizations of the adversary, demonstrating that these systems implement secure enclaves for the stated adversary models.
Micro-architectural side-channel-attacks are presently daunting threats to most mathematically elegant encryption algorithms. Even though there exist various defense mechanisms, most of them come with the extra overhead of implementation. Recent studies have prevented some particular categories of these attacks but fail to address the detection of other classes. This paper presents a generic machine learning based multi-layer detection approach targeting these micro-architectural side-channel-attacks, without concentrating on a single category. The proposed approach work by pro ling low-level hardware events using Linux perf event API and then by analyzing these data with some appropriate machine learning techniques. This paper also presents a novel approach, using time-series data, to correlate the execution trace of the adversary with the secret key of encryption for dealing with false-positives and unknown attacks. The experimental results and performance of the proposed approach suggest its superiority with high detection accuracy and low performance overhead.
The Boyen-Li signature scheme [Asiacrypt'16] is a major theoretical breakthrough. Via a clever homomorphic evaluation of a pseudorandom function over their verification key, they achieve a reduction loss in security linear in the underlying security parameter and entirely independent of the number of message queries made, while still maintaining short signatures (consisting of a single short lattice vector). All previous schemes with such an independent reduction loss in security required a linear number of such lattice vectors, and even in the classical world, the only schemes achieving short signatures relied on non-standard assumptions.

We improve on their result, providing a verification key smaller by a linear factor, a significantly tighter reduction with only a constant loss, and signing and verification algorithms that could plausibly run in about 1 second. Our main idea is to change the scheme in a manner that allows us to replace the pseudorandom function evaluation with an evaluation of a much more efficient weak pseudorandom function.

As a matter of independent interest, we give an improved method of randomized inversion of the G gadget matrix [MP12], which reduces the noise growth rate in homomorphic evaluations performed in a large number of lattice-based cryptographic schemes, without incurring the high cost of sampling discrete Gaussians.
Connectivity becomes increasingly important also for small embedded systems such as typically found in industrial control installations. More and more use-cases require secure remote user access increasingly incorporating handheld based human machine interfaces, using wireless links such as Bluetooth. Correspondingly secure operator authentication becomes of utmost importance. Unfortunately, often passwords with all their well-known pitfalls remain the only practical mechanism. We present an assessment of the security requirements for the industrial setting, illustrating that offline attacks on passwords-based authentication protocols should be considered a significant threat. Correspondingly use of a Password Authenticated Key Exchange protocol becomes desirable. We review the signif-icant challenges faced for implementations on resource-constrained devices. We explore the design space and shown how we succeeded in tailoring a partic-ular variant of the Password Authenticated Connection Establishment (PACE) protocol, such that acceptable user interface responsiveness was reached even for the constrained setting of an ARM Cortex-M0+ based Bluetooth low-energy transceiver running from a power budget of 1.5 mW without notable energy buffers for covering power peak transients.
Garbled circuits are of central importance in cryptography, finding widespread application in secure computation, zero-knowledge (ZK) protocols, and verifiable outsourcing of computation to name a few. We are interested in a particular kind of garbling scheme, termed privacy-free in the literature. We show that Boolean formulas can be garbled information-theoretically in the privacy-free setting, producing no ciphertexts at all. Existing garbling schemes either rely on cryptographic assumptions (and thus require cryptographic operations to construct and evaluate garbled circuits), produce garbled circuits of non-zero size, or are restricted to low depth formulaic circuits. Our result has both theoretical and practical implications for garbled circuits as a primitive. On the theory front, our result breaks the known theoretical lower bound of one ciphertext for garbling an AND gate in this setting. As an interesting implication of producing size zero garbled circuits, our scheme scores adaptive security for free. On the practical side, our garbling scheme involves only cheap XOR operations and produces size zero garbled circuits. As a side result, we propose several interesting extensions of our scheme. Namely, we show how to garble threshold and high fan-in gates. An aspect of our garbling scheme that we believe is of theoretical interest is that it does not maintain the invariant that the garbled circuit evaluator must not at any point be in possession of both keys of any wire in the garbled circuit.

Our scheme directly finds application in ZK protocols where the verification function of the language is representable by a formulaic circuit. Such examples include Boolean formula satisfiability. The ZK protocols obtained by plugging in our scheme in the known paradigm of building ZK protocols from garbled circuits offer better proof size, while relying on standard assumptions. Furthermore, the adaptivity of our garbling scheme allows us to cast our ZK protocols in the offline-online setting and offload circuit dependent communication and computation to the offline phase. As a result, the online phase enjoys communication and computation (in terms of number of symmetric key operations) complexity that are linearly proportional to the witness size alone.
Goals and Responsibilities

The goal of this research project is to provide a wider analysis of the existing cryptologic designs and their constructions in order to provide the possibility of new approaches to the designs and analysis of cryptographic components. The conducted research will be in the context of symmetric cryptology and secure hardware implementations. A particular focus will be on the design and analysis of symmetric-key primitives and components.

Required Qualifications

Candidates should have a Ph.D. degree or equivalent experience. Candidates should have a background in symmetric cryptology, hardware cryptology, hardware security or related areas. The following is a list of essential skills for the considered post: Circuit Analysis and Design, Cryptographic Hardware Design (Reconfigurable Hardware, random number generation, lightweight cryptographic design, ALTERA hardware, FPGAs and Verilog VHDL programming), and Cryptographic Design and Cryptanalysis

Terms of employment

The period of employment is one to two years from the initiation of the contract. This is extendable to additional year based on performance. The potential start date is August 2017. The location of the post is Center for Cyber Security in NYU Abu Dhabi.

Application Process

Submissions will be accepted through our online application no later than July 15, 2017. Please visit our website at https://apply.interfolio.com/37893 for instructions and information on how to apply. Please fill in the online application form, and attach all your materials in English. This includes a cover letter, research statement, curriculum vitae, diploma (an official translation into English), a list of publications and three letters of reference. Applicants will be prompted to enter the names and email addresses of three referees. Each referee will be contacted to upload his or her reference letter. Applications and enclosures received beyond the stated deadline will not be considered.

Closing date for applications: 15 August 2017

Contact: Hoda A.Alkhezaimi

13 June 2017
Event date: 9 January to 11 January 2018
Event date: 14 September to 15 September 2017
Do you have a PhD/Master in Cryptography, Security, Software Engineering, Electronics, or Mathematics? We are currently looking for both a software and hardware security architect to extend our growing crypto and security teams for our office in Leuven (Belgium), Eindhoven (Netherlands), Hamburg (Germany) or Gratkorn (Austria).

Software Security Engineer is responsible for

• Design of embedded software security architectures

• Risk and threats analysis of security systems

• Support the various HW and SW development teams of NXP with security reference designs

• End-to-end security architecture

• Root cause analysis of security defects and creation of counter measures

• Specification and design of innovative security concepts (whitebox cryptography, secure virtual machines, code obfuscators)

Hardware Security Engineer is responsible for

• Detailed implementation reviews

• Definition of security mechanisms in hardware, firmware, protocols, etc.

• Security requirements management by definition and linking of security mechanisms to functional requirements

• Detailed attack modeling and security mechanism specification for hardware and software blocks

• Root cause analysis of security defects

• Planning coordination and execution of pre-silicon vulnerability analysis

https://nxp.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/careers/job/Hamburg/Hardware-Security-Architect--m-f-_R-10002704

https://nxp.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/careers/job/Hamburg/Software-Security-Architect--m-f-_R-10002703

NXP Semiconductors enables secure connections and infrastructure for a smarter world, advancing solutions that make lives easier, better and safer. As the world leader in secure connectivity solutions for embedded applications, we are driving innovation in the secure connected vehicle, end-to-end security & privacy and smart connected solutions markets.

Closing date for applications: 31 December 2017

Contact: Joppe Bos, Cryptographer, joppe.bos (at) nxp.com

8 June 2017
Event date: 28 September to 29 September 2017
A new H2020 MSCA ITN project RESCUE has 15 Early-Stage Researcher / PhD Student positions open at eight partner institutions.

An innovative European training network RESCUE is to take on the key interdependent challenges in nanoelectronic systems design - reliability, security and quality.

• Application deadline: June 30, 2017

• Recruitment starts in September/October 2017

• Full-time employment contracts at the selected RESCUE host institution for 36 month.

More details http://rescue-etn.eu/

RESCUE Consortium

- Tallinn University of Technology, EE (Maksim Jenihhin)

- BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg, DE (H.T. Vierhaus)

- Delft University of Technology, NL (Said Hamdioui)

- Politecnico di Torino, IT (Matteo Sonza Reorda)

- Cadence Design Systems GmbH, DE (Anton Klotz)

- IROC Technologies, FR (Dan Alexandrescu)

- Intrinsic-ID B.V., NL (Georgios Selimis)

- IHP - Innovations for High Performance Microelectronics GmbH, DE (Milos Krstic)

- Robert Bosch GmbH, DE - Partner Organization (Herve Seudie)

Closing date for applications: 30 June 2017