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12 December 2025
University College Cork, Ireland
The successful candidate will investigate privacy risks in online digital spaces, focusing on communities that connect people across countries and those tied to specific physical locations, such as city-based forums. The research will examine potential privacy breaches, including de-anonymisation attacks, and develop countermeasures using techniques such as differential privacy and cryptographic protocols. This work will require close collaboration with social scientists and other stakeholders, ensuring that technical solutions are informed by societal and ethical considerations.
The ideal applicant holds a PhD in Computer Science or related disciplines and has experience in cyber security and privacy research. They should have a good track record in relevant conferences and journals and has a track record in one or more of the following research areas: privacy enhancing technologies, differential privacy, anonymity, re-identification, and/or cryptography. Previous experience in working on interdisciplinary projects is an asset.
Preference will be given to candidates at postdoctoral level. If the selected candidate has not yet completed their PhD, they will be appointed at the research assistant level.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Dr. Paolo Palmieri at p.palmieri@cs.ucc.ie
More information: https://security.ucc.ie/vacancies.html
Shaoquan Jiang
Suprava Roy, Ratna Dutta
Varsha Jarali, Hari Preeth S, Khushboo Bussi, Shashi Kant Pandey
Jianming Lin, Yu Dai, Chang-An Zhao, Yuhao Zheng
Anisha Dutta, Sayantan Chakraborty, Chandan Goswami, Avishek Adhikari
Jonas Hofmann, Philipp-Florens Lehwalder, Shahriar Ebrahimi, Parisa Hassanizadeh, Sebastian Faust
In this paper, we take on both challenges. We present PIRANHAS, a publicly verifiable, asynchronous, and anonymous attestation scheme for individual devices and swarms. We leverage zk-SNARKs to transform any classical, symmetric remote attestation scheme into a non-interactive, publicly verifiable, and anonymous one. Verifiers only ascertain the validity of the attestation, without learning any identifying information about the involved devices.
For IoT swarms, PIRANHAS aggregates attestation proofs for the entire swarm using recursive zk-SNARKs. Our system supports arbitrary network topologies and allows nodes to dynamically join and leave the network. We provide formal security proofs for the single-device and swarm setting, showing that our construction meets the desired security guarantees. Further, we provide an open-source implementation of our scheme using the Noir and Plonky2 framework, achieving an aggregation runtime of just 356ms.
Yuanmi Chen, Zhao Chen, Tingting Guo, Chao Sun, Weiqiang Wen, Yu Yu
Our approach decouples the head and tail blocks of the lattice basis. For a properly selected parameter, each enumeration space becomes asymptotically the square root of the original search space. Each tail vector is then extended to the head block space to find its closest vectors using an efficient neighboring search algorithm. Among all pairs of neighboring vectors that we iterate through, the shortest difference vector is then the solution to the Shortest Vector Problem (SVP).
Apart from the exact version of the algorithm which is of theoretical interest, we also propose heuristic strategies to improve the practical efficiency. First, we show the adaptation of our algorithm to pruned enumeration. Then we show that with a particularly chosen backbone lattice (rescaled~\(\mathbb{Z}^n\)), we are able to accelerate the neighboring search process to an extremely efficient degree. Finally, we optimize parameters and give a practical cost estimation to show how much acceleration we could bring using this new algorithm.
Clément Hoffmann, Pierrick Méaux, Charles Momin, Yann Rotella, François-Xavier Standaert, Balazs Udvarhelyi
Clément Hoffmann, Pierrick Méaux, Mélissa Rossi, François-Xavier Standaert
In response, we introduce Learning With Error with Output Dependencies (LWE-OD), a novel learning problem defined by an error distribution that depends on the inner product value and therefore on the key. LWE-OD instances are remarkably versatile, generalizing both established theoretical problems like Learning With Errors (LWE) or Learning With Rounding (LWR), and emerging physical problems such as Learning With Physical Rounding (LWPR).
Our core contribution is establishing a reduction from LWE-OD to LWE. This is accomplished by leveraging an intermediate problem, denoted qLWE. Our reduction follows a two-step, simulator-based approach, yielding explicit conditions that guarantee LWE-OD is at least as computationally hard as LWE. While this theorem provides a valuable reduction, it also highlights a crucial distinction among reductions: those that allow explicit calculation of target distributions versus weaker ones with conditional results. To further demonstrate the utility of our framework, we offer new proofs for existing results, specifically the reduction from LWR to LWE and from Learning Parity with Noise with Output Dependencies (LPN-OD) to LPN. This new reduction opens the door for a potential reduction from LWPR to LWE.
Friedrich Wiemer, Arthur Mutter, Jonathan Ndop, Julian Göppert, Axel Sikora, Thierry Walrant
To address these constraints, CANsec has been proposed to address the security objectives of CAN XL. As a Layer 2 security protocol, CANsec aims to overcome SecOC’s shortcomings and offer modern guarantees comparable to MACsec. However, the CANsec specification remains under active development even after several years of work, leaving a gap between conceptual goals and practical deployment.
This paper proposes a pragmatic and standards-aligned solution: it re-uses existing MACsec specifications and implementations as the security engine for CAN XL.
MACsec, standardized for over two decades and widely scrutinized in both academic and industrial contexts, offers robust and well-understood security functions. Our approach introduces a lightweight wrapper that maps CAN XL frames to virtual Ethernet frames, enabling MACsec to provide confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, and freshness. We formally define the wrapping process, frame formats, and protocol data units, while preserving MACsec’s security properties, adapting them to the constraints and requirements of automotive networks. This enables a practical and secure path forward for CAN XL deployment, leveraging mature cryptographic algorithms and protocols without compromising performance or assurance.
To support standardization and practical adoption, we have submitted this approach to the CAN in Automation (CiA) CANsec specification task force, CiA's IG 04 SIG 01 TF 03 CAN XL security, contributing to the ongoing effort to define an efficient, standardized and interoperable security solution for CAN XL.
Alan T. Sherman, Jeremy J. Romanik Romano, Edward Zieglar, Enis Golaszewski, Jonathan D. Fuchs, William E. Byrd
Miranda Christ, Noah Golowich, Sam Gunn, Ankur Moitra, Daniel Wichs
In the short time since the introduction of PRCs, several works (NeurIPS '24, RANDOM '25, STOC '25) have proposed new constructions. Curiously, all of these constructions are vulnerable to quasipolynomial-time distinguishing attacks. Furthermore, all lack robustness to edits over a constant-sized alphabet, which is necessary for a meaningfully robust LLM watermark. Lastly, they lack robustness to adversaries who know the watermarking detection key. Until now, it was not clear whether any of these properties was achievable individually, let alone together.
We construct pseudorandom codes that achieve all of the above: plausible subexponential pseudorandomness security, robustness to worst-case edits over a binary alphabet, and robustness against even computationally unbounded adversaries that have the detection key. Pseudorandomness rests on a new assumption that we formalize, the permuted codes conjecture, which states that a distribution of permuted noisy codewords is pseudorandom. We show that this conjecture is implied by the permuted puzzles conjecture used previously to construct doubly efficient private information retrieval. To give further evidence, we show that the conjecture holds against a broad class of simple distinguishers, including read-once branching programs.
Magali Salom, Nicolas Sendrier, Valentin Vasseur
Suleyman Kardas, Mehmet Sabir Kiraz, Dmitry Savonin, Yao Wang, Aliaksei Dziadziuk
Mohamed Malhou, Ludovic Perret, Kristin Lauter
Antoine Mesnard, Jean-Pierre Tillich, Valentin Vasseur
Keitaro Hiwatashi, Reo Eriguchi
Harish Karthikeyan, Yue Guo, Leo de Castro, Antigoni Polychroniadou, Leo Ardon, Udari Madhushani Sehwag, Sumitra Ganesh, Manuela Veloso
Agents, including those based on large language models, are inherently probabilistic and heuristic. There is no formal guarantee of how an agent will behave for any query, making them ill-suited for operations critical to security. To address this, we introduce AgentCrypt, a four-tiered framework for fine-grained, encrypted agent communication that adds a protection layer atop any AI agent platform. AgentCrypt spans unrestricted data exchange (Level 1) to fully encrypted computation using techniques such as homomorphic encryption (Level 4). Crucially, it guarantees the privacy of tagged data is always maintained, prioritizing privacy above correctness.
AgentCrypt ensures privacy across diverse interactions and enables computation on otherwise inaccessible data, overcoming barriers such as data silos. We implemented and tested it with Langgraph and Google ADK, demonstrating versatility across platforms. We also introduce a benchmark dataset simulating privacy-critical tasks at all privacy levels, enabling systematic evaluation and fostering the development of regulatable machine learning systems for secure agent communication and computation.
11 December 2025
University of Vienna, Technical U Vienna, Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA)
FARCry (Foundations & Applications of Resource-Restricted Cryptography) is a joint research project by the University of Vienna, Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), and TU Wien, funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) under grant ICT25-081
We invite applications for PhD positions in cryptography, privacy, and provable security. FARCry investigates cryptographic primitives and protocols whose security and privacy rest on bounded computational resources (work, time, space)—including verifiable delay functions (VDFs), proofs of space/work, memory‑hard functions, and privacy‑enhancing applications such as deniable communication and Sybil‑resistance.
Candidates with a strong background in theoretical computer science and/or mathematics are encouraged to apply. For more information, please contact the respective PI directly (with "FARCry [your name]" in the Subject).
The positions start from October 2026. For ISTA, applications go through the graduate school where the deadline is January 8th
Closing date for applications:
Contact:
- Ass.-Prof. Karen Azari, University of Vienna — karen.azari@univie.ac.at
-
Prof. Krzysztof Pietrzak, ISTA — krzpie@gmail.com
- Prof. Dominique Schröder, TU Wien — dominique.schroeder@@tuwien.ac.at
More information: https://krzpie.github.io/FARCry/