International Association
for Cryptologic Research

For many years EM Side-Channel Attacks, which exploit the statistical link between the magnetic field radiated by secure ICs and the data they process, are a critical threat. Indeed, attackers need to find only one hotspot (position of the EM probe over the IC surface) where there is an exploitable leakage to compromise the security. As a result, designing secure ICs robust against these attacks is incredibly difficult because designers must warrant there is no hotspot over the whole IC surface. This task is all the more difficult as there is no CAD tool to compute the magnetic field radiated by ICs and hence no methodology to detect hotspots at the design stages. Within this context, this paper introduces a flow allowing predicting the EM radiations of ICs and two related methodologies. The first one aims at identifying and quantifying the dangerousness of EM hotspots at the surface of ICs, i.e. positions where to place an EM probe to capture a leakage. The second aims at locating leakage hotspots in ICs, i.e. areas in circuits from where these leakages originate.

There has been recent exciting progress on building non-interactive non-malleable commitments from judicious assumptions. All proposed approaches proceed in two steps. First, obtain simple "base'' commitment schemes for very small tag/identity spaces based on a various sub-exponential hardness assumptions. Next, assuming sub-exponential non-interactive witness indistinguishable proofs (NIWIs), and variants of keyless collision resistant hash functions, construct non-interactive compilers that convert tag-based non-malleable commitments for a small tag space into tag-based non-malleable commitments for a larger tag space. We propose the first black-box construction of non-interactive non-malleable commitments. Our key technical contribution is a novel way of implementing the non-interactive proof of consistency required by the tag amplification process. Prior to our work, the only known approach to tag amplification without setup and with black-box use of the base scheme (Goyal, Lee, Ostrovsky and Visconti, FOCS 2012) added multiple rounds of interaction. Our construction satisfies the strongest known definition of non-malleability, i.e., CCA (chosen commitment attack) security. In addition to being black-box, our approach dispenses with the need for sub-exponential NIWIs, that was common to all prior work. Instead of NIWIs, we rely on sub-exponential hinting PRGs which can be obtained based on a broad set of assumptions such as sub-exponential CDH or LWE.

We examine the security of the Australian card payment system by analysing existing cryptographic protocols in this analysis. We compare current Australian cryptographic methods with their international counterparts, such as the ANSI TR-31 methods. Then, finally, we formulate a formal difference between the two schemes using security proofs.

We initiate a fine-grained study of the round complexity of Oblivious RAM (ORAM). We prove that any one-round balls-in bins ORAM that does not duplicate balls must have either \Omega(\sqrt{N}) bandwidth or \Omega(\sqrt{N}) client memory, where N is the number of memory slots being simulated. This shows that such schemes are strictly weaker than general (multi-round) ORAMs or those with server computation, and in particular implies that a one-round version of the original square-root ORAM of Goldreich and Ostrovksy (J. ACM 1996) is optimal. We prove this bound via new techniques that differ from those of Goldreich and Ostrovksy, and of Larsen and Nielsen (CRYPTO 2018), which achieved an \Omega(\log N) bound for balls-in-bins and general multi-round ORAMs respectively. Finally we give a weaker extension of our bound that allows for limited duplication of balls, and also show that our bound extends to multiple-round ORAMs of a restricted form that include the best known constructions.

Copy-protection allows a software distributor to encode a program in such a way that it can be evaluated on any input, yet it cannot be "pirated" - a notion that is impossible to achieve in a classical setting. Aaronson (CCC 2009) initiated the formal study of quantum copy-protection schemes, and speculated that quantum cryptography could offer a solution to the problem thanks to the quantum no-cloning theorem.

In this work, we introduce a quantum copy-protection scheme for a large class of evasive functions known as "compute-and-compare programs" - a more expressive generalization of point functions. A compute-and-compare program $\mathsf{CC}[f,y]$ is specified by a function $f$ and a string $y$ within its range: on input $x$, $\mathsf{CC}[f,y]$ outputs $1$, if $f(x) = y$, and $0$ otherwise. We prove that our scheme achieves non-trivial security against fully malicious adversaries in the quantum random oracle model (QROM), which makes it the first copy-protection scheme to enjoy any level of provable security in a standard cryptographic model. As a complementary result, we show that the same scheme fulfils a weaker notion of software protection, called "secure software leasing", introduced very recently by Ananth and La Placa (eprint 2020), with a standard security bound in the QROM, i.e. guaranteeing negligible adversarial advantage.

Context and funding: Chair C3S (Connected Cars and Cyber Security), https://chairec3s.wp.imt.fr/
Ph.D. positions in cryptography and security, with focus on distributed protocols, cryptology and Secure Multi-party Computation. Secure “multi-party computation” (MPC) is a type of cryptographic protocol that allows a set of parties to compute a function of each of their individual inputs, without having to reveal their inputs. It would be interesting to explore the use of this approach in the context of the autonomous connected vehicles to define protocols that preserve privacy and integrity, and ensure secure communications in a highly distributed context.
Position is available in the INFRES (Computer Science and Network) Department at Telecom Paris of the Institute of Polytechnique de Paris (IP Paris), France.
The expected Ph.D research takes part of research activities carried out in the Axis 2 of the Chair C3S and especially related to topic 2 – Protection of data and data flow in real time, cryptography and agility focusing on light and robust cryptography, real-time cryptography and crypto-agility. Candidates should have a strong background in computer science and cryptography. Demonstrated expertise in cryptography, distributed computing, or multi-party computation is a plus. Applicants must hold a master degree in the relevant research fields. Positions are available and come with a competitive salary. The selection process runs until suitable candidates are found. If you are interested, please apply by sending email with one single PDF file and subject line set to Application for Ph.D., addressed directly to Prof. Duong Hieu Phan and Prof. Houda Labiod from Infres Department, Institute Polytecnique de Paris and Dr. Aurélien Dupin from Thalès Group. Since we receive many applications, we encourage you to include necessary materials that demonstrate your motivation and strengths.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Hieu Phan (hieu.phan@telecom-paris.fr) and Houda Labiod (houda.labiod@telecom-paris.fr).

Event date: 27 January to 28 January 2021
Submission deadline: 15 November 2020
Notification: 15 December 2020

I am looking to hire a number of post-doctoral fellows and PhD students with expertise and interests in the area of hardware security, AI hardware security, homomorphic encryption, neuromorphic computing, physical design verification, digital twins, VLSI design, and more. Candidates with strong background on these areas should send me their CV at tehranipoor@ufl.edu .

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Prof. Mark Tehranipoor tehranipoor@ufl.edu

More information: http://tehranipoor.ece.ufl.edu/

Look for a Postdoc / Research Fellow on blockchain security. Interested candidates please send your CV with a research statement to Prof. Jianying Zhou. Only short-listed candidates will be contacted for interview.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Prof. Jianying Zhou (jianying_zhou@sutd.edu.sg)

More information: http://jianying.space/

We are looking for a candidate with proven scientific expertise in the field of Security & Privacy. The following areas are of particular interest:

• Formal Methods and Security
• Privacy Technologies
• Systems Security
• Usable Security & Privacy

The successful candidate will cover one of these fields or any other field in security & privacy that complements the existing strengths in the department.

The professorship will be part of the Institute of Applied Information Processing and Communications, which is an internationally visible research environment with more than 60 researchers in information security. The institute collaborates closely with research groups and industry partners around the globe. It is a central part of the recently established Cybersecurity Campus Graz, which unites basic research, education, technology transfer, and industry partners in cybersecurity all under one roof.

The new professor will build an internationally visible group, and will be an engaged teacher in the Computer Science programs at the Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD level. At Graz University of Technology, undergraduate courses are taught in German or English and graduate courses are taught in English.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: For further question, please contact Stefan Mangard / stefan.mangard@iaik.tugraz.at

The application should be sent to the Dean of the Department of Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering at applications.csbme@tugraz.at until 26.11.2020 referencing to 7050/20/035

More information: https://www.tugraz.at/fakultaeten/csbme/news/jobs-grants-calls/tenure-track-professor-in-security-and-privacy/