International Association
for Cryptologic Research

TAMIS research group at IRISA (Rennes, France) is seeking two motivated researchers (1 Ph.D. and 1 research engineer) in the area of side-channel analysis for malware detection.

The project targets to build a malware detection framework using side-channel information.

We are looking for team players who are motivated to drive top-quality research and save the world. The area of research lies between two fields and we expect at least competences in one of them: security on embedded devices and/or malware analysis.

The positions are available from March 2019, but starting dates are negotiable.

The Ph.D. position is estimated for 3 years. The initial contract for the research engineer will be one year, but extendable for 3 years in case of successful performance.

Review of applications will start immediately until position is filled.

Interested candidates should contact us asap and send their detailed CVs, cover letter and references.

Closing date for applications: 1 March 2019

Contact: Annelie Heuser, annelie.heuser (at) irisa.fr

More information: http://www.annelieheuser.com/AH/AHMA.html

NTU Postdoctoral Fellowship 2018.

The fellowship provides post-doc scholars from around the world with the opportunity to conduct one year of independent investigations at NTU in Singapore and one year at a Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP) research partner institution in Sweden e.g., Chalmers University of Technology and collaborate with Katerina Mitrokotsa and her group focusing on security and privacy and cryptography.

The official call closes on the 30th of Nov. 2018.

Please contact Katerina Mitrokotsa in case you are interested to work with her until the 27th of Nov. 2018

Closing date for applications: 30 November 2018

Contact: Katerina Mitrokotsa

Associate Professor

Chalmers University of Technology

Department of Computer Science & Engineering

aikmitr (at) chalmers.se

More information: http://www.ntu.edu.sg/ppf/Pages/home.aspx

Locations:

Beijing, Shenzhen & Singapore.

Duties & Responsibilities:

• Formulate research problems based on real-world security requirements and conduct high-quality research independently.

o Understand business requirements from the products of Huawei and translate them into technical requirements and research topics.

o Design innovative solutions for security requirements from Huawei’s products while fulfilling various constraints from all aspects, including compliance, manufacturing process, hardware capability, performance, cost, etc.

o Design and develop prototypes; deliver research results and provide competitive solution to the product lines.

• Contribute to the research activities in applied cryptography team; participate or lead research subjects.
• Work on IP (Intellectual Property, i.e. patents) and standardization.
• Develop collaborations with industry peers and academia.
• Participate and contribute in corporate direction and strategy over security technology.

Skills / Qualifications:

• M.sc or Ph.D. in Mathematics, Cryptography, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related field with 2-5 years of experience in information security or applied cryptography.
• Programming skills in at least one language. C, C++, Java, or Shell codes, etc.
• Good written and verbal communications skills.
• Self-motivated with strong sense of responsibility.
• Strong interpersonal and problem solving skills.
• Knowledge in one or more of the following areas is preferred:

o Deep understanding of elliptic curves, bilinear pairing and underline algebra.

o Lattice-based algorithms & post-quantum cryptographic algorithms.

o Blockchain and other distributed ledger technology.

o Privacy protection algorithms such as Homomorphic Encryption, Multiparty Computation & Zero-Knowledge Proofs.

o Symmetric-key cryptography, including white-box crypto algorithm.

Closing date for applications: 30 March 2019

Contact: Shuang Wu, wu.shuang (at) huawei.com

Several full-time research positions in cryptography, blockchain, and formal verification are available at Computer Science, Aarhus University at several levels.

We are looking for:

• PhD students

• Postdocs

• Assistant Professors (tenure track)

• Associate Professors

We are hiring within the following topics:

• Consensus protocols for blockchains

• Blockchain technology

• Game theoretic analysis of cryptographic protocols and blockchains

• Privacy-enhancing technologies

• Differential Privacy

• Zero-knowledge proofs

• Efficient implementation of secure multiparty computation

• Theory of secure multiparty computation

• Secure multiparty computation for the blockchain

• Cryptographic security models

• Formally verified cryptographic implementations

• Language design and semantics for smart contracts

• Formal verification of cryptographic protocols, including blockchain and secure multiparty computation

Applying

If you are interested in a PhD or postdoc position contact us as soon as possible. Positions will stay open until suitable candidates are found. PhD students will later formally apply here: http://phd.scitech.au.dk/for-applicants/ (Deadline February 2019). Assistant Professor or Associate Professor applications are sent here: http://cs.au.dk/about-us/vacancies/scientific-positions/stillinger/Vacancy/show/1009431/5283/ (deadline January, 2019), but feel free to contact us for more information if you are interested in applying.

Closing date for applications: 1 February 2019

Contact: any of:

• Ivan Damgård, ivan (at) cs.au.dk

• Jesper Buus Nielsen, jbn (at) cs.au.dk

• Claudio Orlandi, orlandi (at) cs.au.dk

• Bas Spitters, spitters (at) cs.au.dk

The Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria is seeking applicants for up to four positions at the Assistant or Associate rank. Candidates with research in AI, Systems, Theory, or Interdisciplinary Areas, as broadly defined by csrankings.org, are encouraged to apply. Another position at the Assistant or Associate rank, with a preference for female applicants, is available.

Closing date for applications: 21 December 2018

Contact: search (at) csc.uvic.ca

More information: https://www.uvic.ca/engineering/computerscience/people/employment-opportunities/index.php

CryptoExperts is looking for highly motivated engineers / researchers to work on applied cryptographic topics.

The job would include

• conducting missions of {design, development, evaluation} of crypto {primitives, protocols, applications} for CryptoExperts customers,

• managing your own research and taking part to collaborative research projects,

• developing innovative crypto technologies and products.

CryptoExperts office is located in the center of Paris.

A PhD degree (preferably in crypto) and a previous experience in development are a strong plus.

To apply, please send your resume and a short statement (background and what you would like to achieve next) at jobs (at) cryptoexperts.com

Closing date for applications: 31 March 2019

Contact: jobs (at) cryptoexperts.com

More information: https://www.cryptoexperts.com/

Applications are invited for a Ph.D. position in the field of cryptography at the Department of Information and Communication Technologies at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, to be co-supervised by Dr. Vanesa Daza (UPF) and Dr. Alessandra Scafuro (NCSU). Research in Anonymity and Accountability in Blockchain technologies is expected. The starting date will be around September 2019.

Only outstanding candidates that satisfy international mobility criteria will be considered (i.e. the applicant should not have resided or carried out their main activity in Spain for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately prior to the recruitment date).

The contract will be for 3 years with a gross salary of €34,800, plus other advantages.

The candidate should hold or be about to receive a master\'s degree by September 2019 in computer science, mathematics or a related area. Specialization in cryptography (demonstrated by a relevant MSc) will be positively evaluated.

The application must include: research interests and motivation for applying for the position, CV, the names of two referees, transcripts and diplomas, and a list of any scientific work (if any).

Further inquiries about the project and conditions should be sent to cryptophdapplications (at) upf.edu .

Closing date for applications: 3 January 2019

Contact: cryptophdapplications (at) upf.edu

Your Responsibilities:

- Definition of IoT end-to-end security architecture

- Creation of innovative and disruptive security solutions

- Specification / Design / Review of embedded security architectures

- Risk and threats analysis of security systems

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

-Technical interface to customers and to the product development team

Your Profile:

- Have a Master degree or PhD in Cryptography, Security, Software Engineering, Electronics, Mathematics

- Have experience in the design and development of Embedded Secure Systems

- Knowledge of SoCs and/or Smartcard/Secure Element products

- Have a security background

- Independent working style, but willingness to listen and to adapt

- Very good communication skills

- Strong team player

- Willingness to travel

Closing date for applications: 31 December 2018

Contact: Veronika von Hepperger, Senior Recruiter, (Email: Veronika.vonhepperger (at) nxp.com)

More information: https://nxp.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/careers/job/Hamburg/SoC-IC-Security-Hardware-Architect_R-10010354

Project

The cryptography group at AIT is looking for a Ph.D. student to work on the PROFET (Cryptographic Foundations for Future-proof Internet Security) project, led by Dr. Daniel Slamanig (AIT) in cooperation with the Security and Privacy group at TU Wien (Prof. Matteo Maffei). The project is planned to start in Q1 2019 and has a duration of 3 years.

The project targets at designing public-key cryptography capable to secure tomorrow\'s Internet which will encompass paradigms such as cloud computing, the IoT or distributed ledgers as essential ingredients. It specifically puts a focus on: (1) designing security models and schemes that are surveillance and subversion resilient by design (forward and post-compromise security), and 2) designing cryptographic schemes that provide post-quantum security (either via generic or direct constructions). The project covers foundational as well as applied aspects.

Research group

The applicant will have a 30h/week employment at AIT in Vienna working in close collaboration with other members of the cryptography group. There will also be a strong interaction with the Security and Privacy group at TU Wien (and in particular with another PhD student ).

Profile

Eligible candidates will hold a Master\'s degree in Mathematics, Computer Science, Information Security or similar discipline. Students who are expected to receive their MSc degree by the end of 2018 are also encouraged to apply. We prefer candidates who can demonstrate that they have developed their research skills during their studies. Adequate English (written and verbal communication) for scientific interactions is required.

Skills

• High motivation for research work and ability to work independently.
• Good organisation and communication skills.
• Eager to disseminate research results through publications and presentations at top-tier conferences.

Closing date for applications: 28 February 2019

Contact:

Interested candidates should send their detailed CVs, cover letter and references. Only short-listed candidates will be contacted for interview.

Contact: Daniel Slamanig, daniel.slamanig (at) ait.ac.at

More information: https://profet.at/

Two (2) full-time research positions in Cyber

Security are available at either Research

Fellow or Senior Research Fellow level in the

School of Electrical Engineering and Computer

Science at QUT.

These positions will undertake research

projects funded by the Cyber Security

Cooperative Research Centre (CRC),

collaborating with its industry partners and

other participant universities throughout

Australia.

Specifically, QUT is host to the CRC’s Resilient

Systems research theme, which focusses on

technological solutions to cyber security

threats, especially those relating to computer

networks. Applicants with research experience

in computer network security, communications

protocols, industrial control systems,

communications log analysis, digital forensics,

complex system modelling, intrusion detection,

and related topics are especially welcome.

Closing date for applications: 13 January 2019

Contact: Professor Colin Fidge

Discipline Leader - Information Security

School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

More information: https://qut.nga.net.au/?jati=87681359-6C3D-B81A-144D-A4B8B24E7607

At the Faculty of Computer Science of the University of Vienna the position of a

University Professor of Security and Privacy

(full time, permanent position) is to be filled.

We are looking for outstanding scientists who are active in the core areas to be covered by this position: information and network security, including privacy. The position is envisioned to serve as a crystallization point in the faculty for security and privacy research and teaching, with the thematic focus on software and systems security. The candidate should demonstrate deep knowledge and have an excellent research record in the theory and practice of security and privacy, with documented outreach to application areas, for example (but not limited to) Cyber Physical Systems or Internet of Things, addressing the increasing demand for security and privacy solutions in research and industry.

Closing date for applications: 7 January 2019

More information: https://personalwesen.univie.ac.at/jobs-recruiting/professuren/detail-seite/news/security-and-privacy/?no_cache=1&tx_new

The security of today's widely used communication security protocols is based on trust in Certificate Authorities (CAs). However, the real security of this approach is debatable, since certificate handling is tedious and many recent attacks have undermined the trust in CAs. On the other hand, opportunistic encryption protocols such as Tcpcrypt, which are currently gaining momentum as an alternative to no encryption, have similar security to using untrusted CAs or self-signed certificates: they only protect against passive attackers.

In this paper, we present a key exchange protocol, Secure Multipath Key Exchange (SMKEX), that enables all the benefits of opportunistic encryption (no need for trusted third parties or pre-established secrets), as well as proven protection against some classes of active attackers. Furthermore, SMKEX can be easily extended to a trust-on-first-use setting and can be easily integrated with TLS, providing the highest security for opportunistic encryption to date while also increasing the security of standard TLS.

We show that SMKEX is made practical by the current availability of path diversity between different AS-es. We also show a method to create path diversity with encrypted tunnels without relying on the network topology. These allow SMKEX to provide protection against most adversaries for a majority of Alexa top 100 web sites.

We have implemented SMKEX using a modified Multipath TCP kernel implementation and a user library that overwrites part of the socket API, allowing unmodified applications to take advantage of the security provided by SMKEX.

Profiled side-channel attacks are the most powerful attacks and they consist of two steps. The adversary first builds a leakage model, using a device similar to the target one, then it exploits this leakage model to extract the secret information from the victim's device. These attacks can be seen as a classification problem, where the adversary needs to decide to what class (corresponding to the secret key) the traces collected from the victim's devices belong. For a number of years, the research community studied profiled attacks and proposed numerous improvements. Despite a large number of empirical works, a framework with strong theoretical foundations to address profiled side-channel attacks is still missing.

In this paper, we propose a framework capable of modeling and evaluating all profiled analysis attacks. This framework is based on the expectation estimation problem that has strong theoretical foundations. Next, we quantify the effects of perturbations injected at different points in our framework through robustness analysis. Finally, we experimentally validate our framework using publicly available traces, several classifiers, and performance metrics.

The current paper improves the number of queries of the previous quantum multi-collision nding algorithms presented by Hosoyamada et al. at Asiacrypt 2017. Let $l$-collision be $l$ distinct inputs that result in the same output of a target function. The previous algorithm finds $l$-collisions by recursively calling the algorithm for finding $(l-1)$-collisions, and it achieves the query complexity of $O(N^{(3^{l-1}-1) / (2 \cdot 3^{l-1})})$. The new algorithm removes the redundancy of the previous recursive algorithm so that computations among different recursive calls can share a part of computations. The new algorithm achieves the query complexity of $\tilde{O}(N^{(2^{l-1}-1) / (2^{l}-1)})$. Moreover, it finds multiclaws for random functions, which are harder to find than multicollisions.

ProtonMail is an online email service that claims to offer end-to-end encryption such that "even [ProtonMail] cannot read and decrypt [user] emails." The service, based in Switzerland, offers email access via webmail and smartphone applications to over five million users as of November 2018. In this work, we provide the first independent analysis of ProtonMail's cryptographic architecture. We find that for the majority of ProtonMail users, no end-to-end encryption guarantees have ever been provided by the ProtonMail service and that the "Zero-Knowledge Password Proofs" are negated by the service itself. We also find and document weaknesses in ProtonMail's "Encrypt-to-Outside" feature. We justify our findings against well-defined security goals and conclude with recommendations.

A cryptosystem for granting/rescinding access permission is proposed, based on elliptic curve cryptography. The `Organizational Cryptosystem' grants access permission not by giving secret (decription) key to the corresponding user but by converting the ciphertext so that the user can decript with their secret key. The `conversion key' for the document, which is created from the secret key which the ciphertext has been originally encrypted for, the public key of the member who shall be permitted to read the ciphertext, and a part of the ciphertext. Therefore it is not possible to decrypt the ciphertext with the conversion key. Nor, for the administrator who issues the conversion key, to obtain any information about the plaintext.

Two of the most significant challenges in the design of blockchain protocols is increasing their transaction processing throughput and minimising latency in terms of transaction settlement. In this work we put forth for the first time a formal execution model that enables to express transaction throughput while supporting formal security arguments regarding safety and liveness. We then introduce parallel-chains, a simple yet powerful non-black-box composition technique for blockchain protocols. We showcase our technique by providing two parallel-chains protocol variants, one for the PoS and one for PoW setting, that exhibit optimal throughput under adaptive fail-stop corruptions while they retain their resiliency in the face of Byzantine adversity assuming honest majority of stake or computational power, respectively. We also apply our parallel-chains composition method to improve settlement latency; combining parallel composition with a novel transaction weighing mechanism we show that it is possible to scale down the time required for a transaction to settle by any given constant while maintaining the same level of security.

We construct non-interactive non-malleable commitments without setup in the plain model, under well-studied assumptions.

First, we construct non-interactive non-malleable commitments with respect to commitment for $\epsilon \log \log n$ tags for a small constant $\epsilon > 0$, under the following assumptions:

- Sub-exponential hardness of factoring or discrete log.

- Quantum sub-exponential hardness of learning with errors (LWE).

Second, as our key technical contribution, we introduce a new tag amplification technique. We show how to convert any non-interactive non-malleable commitment with respect to commitment for $\epsilon\log \log n$ tags (for any constant $\epsilon>0$) into a non-interactive non-malleable commitment with respect to replacement for $2^n$ tags. This part only assumes the existence of sub-exponentially secure non-interactive witness indistinguishable (NIWI) proofs, which can be based on sub-exponential security of the decisional linear assumption.

Interestingly, for the tag amplification technique, we crucially rely on the leakage lemma due to Gentry and Wichs (STOC 2011). For the construction of non-malleable commitments for $\epsilon \log \log n$ tags, we rely on quantum supremacy. This use of quantum supremacy in classical cryptography is novel, and we believe it will have future applications. We provide one such application to two-message witness indistinguishable (WI) arguments from (quantum) polynomial hardness assumptions.

Recently, Gross et al. demonstrated a first-order probing-secure implementation of AES using only two bits of randomness for both the initial sharing and the entire computation of AES. In this note, we recall that first-order probing security may not be sufficient for practical first-order security when randomness is re-cycled. We demonstrate that without taking the transitional leakage into account, the expected security level in a serialized design based on their concept might not be achieved in practice.

We present an efficient implementation of FrodoKEM-640 on an ARM Cortex-M4 core. We leverage the single instruction, multiple data paradigm, available in the instruction set of the ARM Cortex-M4, together with a careful analysis of the memory layout of matrices to considerably speed up matrix multiplications. Our implementations take up to 79.4% less cycles than the reference. Moreover, we challenge the usage of a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator for the generation of the large public matrix involved. We argue that statistically good pseudorandomness is enough to achieve the same security goal. Therefore, we propose to use xoshiro128** as a PRNG instead: its structure can be easily integrated in FrodoKEM-640, it passes all known statistical tests and greatly outperforms previous choices. By using xoshiro128** we improve the generation of the large public matrix, which is a considerable bottleneck for embedded devices, by up to 96%.