International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Excellent students wishing to do a PhD degree in cyber security are invited to apply for PhD positions in the University of York, UK. PhD projects may be in the following broad areas of cyber security:

• applied cryptography, especially the design and implementation of cryptographic schemes and protocols with the aim of preserving user privacy and increasing user security, and
• usable security and privacy, i.e. security and privacy enhancing technologies that are designed to be usable by humans.

The exact project title and brief is to be discussed and finalised with the supervisor.

The scholarship is for non-UK/EU students only and includes both a fee waiver and a living stipend. More information about the scholarship is available at: www.york.ac.uk/study/postgraduate-research/funding/international/ygrs

The final application deadline is 31 January 2019.

Potential candidates are encouraged to contact the supervisor Dr. Siamak F. Shahandashti in the first instance and as soon as possible by email at siamak.shahandashti (at) york.ac.uk and provide their CV, latest academic transcript, and one indicative piece of their research work (e.g. paper, thesis, report) for an initial assessment and discussion of PhD topic. Agreement on the PhD topic and proposal will be required for the final application.

Further information about the supervisor can be found through his homepage: www.cs.york.ac.uk/~siamak

York is a prestigious university in the UK and the Department of Computer Science is ranked top 10 in the UK in terms of research quality. More information about the university can be found here: www.york.ac.uk/about

Closing date for applications: 31 January 2019

Contact: Dr. Siamak F. Shahandashti | siamak.shahandashti (at) york.ac.uk | www.cs.york.ac.uk/~siamak

More information: https://www.york.ac.uk/study/postgraduate-research/funding/international/ygrs

The Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics at University of Warsaw (MIM UW) invites applications for positions of an assistant professor (“adiunkt” in Polish) in Computer Science, starting on 1st October 2019.

MIM UW is one of the strongest computer science faculties in Europe. It is known for talented students (e.g., two wins and 13 times in top ten at the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest) and strong research teams, especially in theoretical aspects of computer science like algorithms, logic and automata, cryptography (e.g., 8 ERC grants in these fields, 4 of them running at the moment). For an overview of research areas represented in the Faculty, see http://www.mimuw.edu.pl/en/dziedziny-badan

Requirements:

- PhD degree in computer science or mathematics

- Strong publication record in international computer science journals or conferences

- Teaching experience

- Mobility record (participation in conferences, research visits, postdoc positions, etc.)

In the current call, the position is offered in two variants:

1. standard \"tenure-track\" position, with teaching load of 210 hrs/year

2. a more \"postdoc-like\" position, for 2 or 4 years, with reduced teaching load (120hrs/year) -- only for candidates at most 5 years after obtaining PhD.

Deadline for applications: 31st January 2019.

More details, including application procedure can be found under the following links:

1. https://www.mimuw.edu.pl/rozne/konkursy-pliki/2019/praca-adiunkt-31-01-2019-en.pdf

2. https://www.mimuw.edu.pl/rozne/konkursy-pliki/2019/praca-adiunkt-s-eilenberg-31-01-2019-en.pdf

For more information about the procedure, requirements, conditions, etc. please contact a vice-director of Institute of Informatics, Lukasz Kowalik (kowalik (at) mimuw.edu.pl).

Closing date for applications: 31 January 2019

Within the scope of the Spanish \"Juan de la Cierva\" postdoctoral programme, the Research group on Cryptology and Information Security (GiCSI) of the Spanish National Research Council is seeking highly motivated professionals in conducting research in the area of blockchain-based protocols, security protocols and cryptographic privacy-enhancing technologies.

There are two types of Juan de la Cierva grants:

1. Juan de la Cierva Training Grants (Juan de la Cierva-Formación) are aimed at candidates that have been awarded their PhD between 01/01/2017 and 31/12/2018. These grants are aimed to complete their postdoctoral research training in Spanish R&D centers other than those in which they carried out their predoctoral training.

2. Juan de la Cierva Incorporation Grants (Juan de la Cierva-Incorporación) are aimed at those who were awarded their PhD between 01/01/2014 and 31/12/2016. These grants are intended to strengthen the grantee’s acquired skills during a first stage of postdoctoral training.

For more information about deadlines and other details, please refer to http://www.ciencia.gob.es/portal/site/MICINN/menuitem.dbc68b34d11ccbd5d52ffeb801432ea0/?vgnextoid=73d917cd13e77610VgnVCM1000001d04140aRCRD.

Interested candidates are encouraged to contact us as soon as possible.

Closing date for applications: 31 January 2019

Contact: David Arroyo, Tenured Scientist at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)

http://www.researcherid.com/rid/A-5167-2010

https://scholar.google.es/citations?user=IORMgpcAAAAJ&hl=es

We have several open positions for PhD/PostDoc at School of Computer Science, Guangzhou University, which is located in Guangzhou, China. Our attractive openings are suitable for PhD candidates and PostDoc researchers who seek to work in the field of information security. The research topics include but not limited to: Security and Privacy in Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, cloud computing security, big data security, IoT security, and public-key cryptography.

PostDoc researchers will be offered competitive salary package plus other benefits, which is around 50,000 USD per year (salary and bonus before tax) and 30,000 USD research funding.

PhD candidates will be provided full research scholarship, allowances, free single dorm room, and round-trip tickets (Once a year).

Interested candidates please send your CV, reference letters, and copies of certificates to Prof. Jin Li. PostDocs please add your publication list.

More information about Prof. Jin Li:

http://www.scholat.com/jinli71

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=7GDV2vUAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

Closing date for applications: 30 July 2019

Closing date for applications: 30 July 2019

Contact: Prof. Jin Li:

E-mail: jinli71 (at) gmail.com

Integrated in Gemalto Zero Footprint Security (ZFS) Team, he/she will study and develop software protection techniques related to White Box Cryptography in the Mobile ecosystem Android and iOS.

A week in the life of a Cryptography Software Engineer:

•Create and develop new IP in the domain

•Respect milestones

•Ensure good quality of delivered software

•Keep knowledge of state of the art in the domain

Knowledge, Skills and Experience:

•Bachelor/Masters in Computer Science/Engineering or equivalent technical domain

•Experience in cryptography in particular White Box Cryptography

•Design, develop and test using C/C++ for execution on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows

•Document research, specifications and design results clearly, with an emphasis on explaining why decisions were made

•Flair for Mathematics topics

•Good to have experience in Android and/or iOS security

•Good to have experience in side channel attacks

•Not afraid by technical challenge

•Be driven and self-motivated

•Communicate clearly and respectfully with local and remote team members

•Collaborate with the team to meet and exceed the team goals

•Display attention to detail

•Find novel solutions to identified needs

•Focus on customer needs

•Learn rapidly advancing technologies

•Embrace changing needs and priorities

•Travelling might be required

Closing date for applications: 1 March 2019

Contact: For interested applicants, please submit your resume to se-asia.recruit (at) gemalto.com with the following information:

Subject/Email Title: IACR: [applicable position title]: [your name]

More information: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/1017741340/

We are looking for a bright post-doctoral researcher focusing in theoretical cryptography and more precisely verifiable delegation of computation to work on a collaborative project on cloud-assisted computing.

The position is fully funded for 2 years. The post-doc will be hired at the department of Computer Science and Engineering at Chalmers and will be working under the supervision of Prof. Katerina Mitrokotsa. The preferred starting date is in April 2019.

To Apply use the online form at: https://goo.gl/HqgGqM

Closing date for applications: 26 January 2019

Contact: Katerina Mitrokotsa, Associate Professor, Chalmers University of Technology, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Gothenburg, Sweden, aikmitr (at) chalmer.se

More information: http://www.chalmers.se/en/about-chalmers/Working-at-Chalmers/Vacancies/Pages/default.aspx?rmpage=job&rmjob=6985

Event date: 23 September to 27 September 2019
Submission deadline: 8 February 2019
Notification: 15 March 2019

Event date: 3 June to 7 June 2019
Submission deadline: 29 April 2019

Event date: 8 July 2019
Submission deadline: 28 January 2019
Notification: 8 April 2019

Event date: 26 August to 30 August 2019

In this paper, we compute hundreds of Bitcoin private keys and dozens of Ethereum, Ripple, SSH, and HTTPS private keys by carrying out cryptanalytic attacks against digital signatures contained in public blockchains and Internet-wide scans. The ECDSA signature algorithm requires the generation of a per-message secret nonce. This nonce must be generated perfectly uniformly, or else an attacker can exploit the nonce biases to compute the long-term signing key. We use a lattice-based algorithm for solving the hidden number problem to efficiently compute private ECDSA keys that were used with biased signature nonces due to multiple apparent implementation vulnerabilities.

The 2019 Levchin Prize has been awarded to:

• Eric Rescorla, for sustained contributions to the standardization of security protocols, most recently in the development and standardization of TLS 1.3; and
• Mihir Bellare, for outstanding contributions to the design and analysis of real-world cryptography, including the development of the random oracle model, modes-of-operation, HMAC, and formal models of key exchange.

The Levchin Prize was established in 2015 by internet entrepreneur, Max Levchin. The prize honors significant contributions to real-world cryptography and celebrates recent advances that have had a major impact on the practice of cryptography and its use in real-world systems. Up to two awards will be given every year and each carries a cash prize of $10,000.

This year's prize was awarded at the Real World Crypto symposium in San Jose, California, USA.

More information about the Levchin Prize and the awardees can be found at levchinprize.com

Secure block cipher design is a complex discipline which combines mathematics, engineering, and computer science. In order to develop cryptographers who are grounded in all three disciplines, it is necessary to undertake synergistic research as early as possible in technical curricula, particularly at the undergraduate university level. In this work, students are presented with a new block cipher, which is designed to offer moderate security while providing engineering and analysis challenges suitable for the senior undergraduate level. The BIG (Block) (Instructional, Generic) cipher is analyzed for vulnerability to linear cryptanalysis. Further, the cipher is implemented using the Nios II microprocessor and two configurations of memory-mapped hardware accelerators, in the Cyclone V FPGA on the Terasic DE1 System-on-chip (SoC). Three distinct implementations are realized: 1) Purely software (optimized for latency), 2) Purely hardware (optimized for area), and 3) A hardware-software codesign (optimized for throughput-to-area ratio). All three implementations are evaluated in terms of latency (encryption and decryption), throughput (Mbps), area (ALMs), and throughput-to-area (TP/A) ratio (Mbps/ALM); all metrics account for a fully functional Nios II, 8 kilobytes of on-chip RAM, Avalon interconnect, benchmark timer, and any hardware accelerators. In terms of security, we demonstrate recovery of a relationship among 12 key bits using as few as 16,000 plaintext/ciphertext pairs in a 6-round reduced round attack and reveal a diffusion rate of only 43.3 percent after 12 rounds. The implementation results show that the hardware-software codesign achieves a 67x speed-up and 37x increase in TP/A ratio over the software implementation, and 5x speed-up and 5x increase in TP/A ratio compared to the hardware implementation.

CryptoNote protocol proved to be very popular among cryptocurrency startups. We propose several features to extend the basic protocol. Among them are Hybrid Mining (a different mining scheme preventing a straightforward 51% attack), Slow Emission (an emission curve better suited for the real-world adoption), Return Addresses (transaction-specic addresses anonymously linking transactions to their originators), Tiny Addresses (short numerical addresses easy to remember and relay). For breivity, we call these features CryptoNote+.

Multi-client functional encryption (MCFE) is a more flexible variant of functional encryption whose functional decryption involves multiple ciphertexts from different parties. Each party holds a different secret key $\mathsf{sk}_i$ and can independently and adaptively be corrupted by the adversary. We present two compilers for MCFE schemes for the inner-product functionality, both of which support encryption labels. Our first compiler transforms any scheme with a special key-derivation property into a decentralized scheme, as defined by Chotard et al. (ASIACRYPT 2018), thus allowing for a simple distributed way of generating functional decryption keys without a trusted party. Our second compiler allows to lift a unnatural restriction present in existing (decentralized) MCFE schemes,which requires the adversary to ask for a ciphertext from each party. We apply our compilers to the works of Abdalla et al. (CRYPTO 2018) and Chotard et al. (ASIACRYPT 2018) to obtain schemes with hitherto unachieved properties. From Abdalla et al., we obtain instantiations of DMCFE schemes in the standard model (from DDH, Paillier, or LWE) but without labels. From Chotard et al., we obtain a DMCFE scheme with labels still in the random oracle model, but without pairings.

In recent years, Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) has been widely used in cryptanalysis of symmetric-key primitives. For differential and linear cryptanalysis, MILP can be used to solve the two problems: calculation of the minimum number of differential/linear active S-boxes, and search for the best differential/linear characteristics. There are already numerous papers published in this area which either find differential characteristics with good probabilities or ones with small numbers of active S-boxes. However, the efficiency is not satisfactory enough for many symmetric-key primitives. In this paper, we will greatly improve the efficiency of the search algorithms for both the two problems based on MILP. Solving the problems of the calculation of the minimum number of differential/linear active S-boxes and the search for the best differential/linear characteristics can be equivalent to solving an MILP model whose feasible region is the set of all possible differential/linear characteristics. However, searching the whole feasible region is inefficient and high-probability differential/linear characteristics are likely to appear on the smaller feasible region with a low number of active S-boxes at some round. Inspired by the idea of divide-and-conquer approach, we divide the whole feasible region into smaller ones and separately search them. We apply our method to 5 lightweight block ciphers: PRESENT, GIFT-64, RECTANGLE, LBLOCK and TWINE. For each cipher, we obtain better results than the best-known ones. For the calculation of the minimum number of differential active S-boxes, we can reach 31-round PRESENT, 28-round GIFT-64 and 17-round RECTANGLE respectively. For the search for the best differential characteristics, we can reach 23, 14, 15, 21 and 17 rounds for the five ciphers respectively. Based on the duality between the differential cryptanalysis and the linear cryptanalysis, we leave the case for linear cryptanalysis in our future work.

Robustly reusable Fuzzy Extractor (rrFE) considers reusability and robustness simultaneously. We present two approaches to the generic construction of rrFE. Both of approaches make use of a secure sketch and universal hash functions. The first approach also employs a special pseudo-random function (PRF), namely unique-input key-shift (ui-ks) secure PRF, and the second uses a key-shift secure auxiliary-input authenticated encryption (AIAE). The ui-ks security of PRF (resp. key-shift security of AIAE), together with the homomorphic properties of secure sketch and universal hash function, guarantees the reusability and robustness of rrFE. Meanwhile, we show two instantiations of the two approaches respectively. The first instantiation results in the first rrFE from the LWE assumption, while the second instantiation results in the first rrFE from the DDH assumption over non-pairing groups.

We introduce CHURP (CHUrn-Robust Proactive secret sharing). CHURP enables secure secret-sharing in dynamic settings, where the committee of nodes storing a secret changes over time. Designed for blockchains, CHURP has lower communication complexity than previous schemes: $O(n)$ on-chain and $O(n^2)$ off-chain in the optimistic case of no node failures.

CHURP includes several technical innovations: An efficient new proactivization scheme of independent interest, a technique (using asymmetric bivariate polynomials) for efficiently changing secret-sharing thresholds, and a hedge against setup failures in an efficient polynomial commitment scheme. We also introduce a general new technique for inexpensive off-chain communication across the peer-to-peer networks of permissionless blockchains.

We formally prove the security of CHURP, report on an implementation, and present performance measurements.

Message franking enables cryptographically verifiable reporting of abusive content in end-to-end encrypted messaging. Grubbs, Lu, and Ristenpart recently formalized the needed underlying primitive, what they call compactly committing authenticated encryption (AE), and analyzed the security of a number of approaches. But all known secure schemes are still slow compared to the fastest standard AE schemes. For this reason Facebook Messenger uses AES-GCM for franking of attachments such as images or videos. We show how to break Facebook’s attachment franking scheme: a malicious user can send an objectionable image to a recipient but that recipient cannot report it as abuse. The core problem stems from use of fast but non-committing AE, and so we build the fastest compactly committing AE schemes to date. To do so we introduce a new primitive, called encryptment, which captures the essential properties needed. We prove that, unfortunately, schemes with performance profile similar to AES-GCM won’t work. Instead, we show how to efficiently transform Merkle-Damgärd-style hash functions into secure encryptments, and how to efficiently build compactly committing AE from encryptment. Ultimately our main construction allows franking using just a single computation of SHA-256 or SHA-3. Encryptment proves useful for a variety of other applications, such as remotely keyed AE and concealments, and our results imply the first single-pass schemes in these settings as well.

NTRU lattices are a class of polynomial rings which allow for compact and efficient representations of the lattice basis, thereby offering very good performance characteristics for the asymmetric algorithms that use them. Signature algorithms based on NTRU lattices have fast signature generation and verification, and relatively small signatures, public keys and private keys.

A few lattice-based cryptographic schemes entail, generally during the key generation, solving the NTRU equation: $$ f G - g F = q \mod x^n + 1 $$ Here $f$ and $g$ are fixed, the goal is to compute solutions $F$ and $G$ to the equation, and all the polynomials are in $\mathbb{Z}[x]/(x^n + 1)$. The existing methods for solving this equation are quite cumbersome: their time and space complexities are at least cubic and quadratic in the dimension $n$, and for typical parameters they therefore require several megabytes of RAM and take more than a second on a typical laptop, precluding onboard key generation in embedded systems such as smart cards.

In this work, we present two new algorithms for solving the NTRU equation. Both algorithms make a repeated use of the field norm in tower of fields; it allows them to be faster and more compact than existing algorithms by factors $\tilde O(n)$. For lattice-based schemes considered in practice, this reduces both the computation time and RAM usage by factors at least 100, making key pair generation within range of smart card abilities.