International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Dr. Yang Zhang (https://yangzhangalmo.github.io/) at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security (Germany) is looking for several fully-funded Ph.D. students working on the following topics:

• Machine learning security and privacy
• Biomedical privacy
• Misinformation detection

Requirements for Ph.D. students:

• A bachelor/master degree in Computer Science, Information Security, or Mathematics
• Excellent English (knowledge of German is not required)
• Good knowledge about machine learning/data mining
• Excellent programming skills

What we offer:

• Full-time working contract (12-month E13-level salary, ~2,400 euros per month)
• Excellent research environment
• Strong supervision

To apply, please send your:

• CV
• Transcript

to zhang@cispa.de

We also have positions for postdocs, if you are interested, please send an email with your CV to zhang@cispa.de as well.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Yang Zhang

As part of the SecInt Doctoral College (SecInt-DK), TU Wien is offering ten positions as university assistant (Pre-Doc) for 4 years. Expected start: 01.01.2021.

Tasks:

• Collaboration on current research projects
• Deepening scientific knowledge
• Collaboration in academic teaching
• Writing a dissertation and publications
• Participation in regular events organized by the SecInt Doctoral College
• Completion of an internship with one of our international research partners
• Presentation of research results and participation in scientific event

The Research Projects: The SecInt Doctoral college offers 10 interdisciplinary research projects from the areas of Formal Methods, Security and Privacy, and Machine Learning, that are each supervised by at least two professors from the corresponding research areas. Additional details on the individual projects can be found at https://secint.visp.wien/projects.

We offer:

• Diverse and exciting tasks, with lots of interdisciplinary collaboration
• Continuing personal and professional education and flexible working hours
• Central location with very good accessibility in a city regularly ranked first worldwide for life quality
• Possibility of an internship with one of our international research partners
• Very competitive salary

Your profile:

• Completion of a master or diploma curriculum in computer science or another related field
• Experience in Mathematical Modeling, Computational Logic, Formal Methods, Security and Privacy, Robotics and/or Machine Learning
• Very good skills in English communication and writing.
• Readiness for interdisciplinary collaboration
• Team competences, problem-solving skills and innovative ability

A predoctoral researcher at TU Wien currently receives a minimum of EUR 2.196,75/month gross, 14 times/year for 30 hours/week and EUR 2.929,00/month for 40 hours/week (about EUR 28.675/year net). Relevant working experiences may increase the monthly income.

We look forward to receiving yo

Closing date for applications:

Contact: secint@visp.wien

More information: https://jobs.tuwien.ac.at/Job/136572

Several PhD positions in the domains of cryptography, computer security, privacy, and blockchain-based systems are available at the University of Connecticut (UConn), Computer Science and Engineering department, led by Prof. Ghada Almashaqbeh.

The positions provide a great opportunity for students with interest in interdisciplinary projects that combine knowledge from various fields towards the design of secure systems and protocols. We target real-world timely problems and aim to provide secure and practical solutions backed by rigorous foundations and efficient implementations/thorough performance testing. We are also interested in conceptual projects that contribute in bridging the gap between theory and practice of Cryptography. For more information about our current and previous projects please check https://ghadaalmashaqbeh.github.io/research/.

For interested students, please send your CV to ghada.almashaqbeh@uconn.edu and provide any relevant information about the topics you want to work on and the skills/related background you have.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Ghada Almashaqbeh (ghada.almashaqbeh@uconn.edu)

More information: https://ghadaalmashaqbeh.github.io/

There are two Ph.D. positions opening at Dr. Berk Gulmezoglu's research group at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Iowa State University, Ames, IA. The research topics are side-channel attacks, ML-based analysis techniques and countermeasures. Interested students are welcomed to send their resume and unofficial transcript to bgulmez@iastate.edu Requirements: Preferred to be at the majors of Computer Science or Computer Engineering. Interested in software-based microarchitectural attacks or deep learning algorithms. Proficiency in programming languages such as C/C++, Python and Javascript. Great enthusiasm of conducting research oriented tasks. Degree: B.S. and M.S. graduates Deadline: preferably starting at Spring 2021. Fall 2021 is also okay. Positions are open until they are filled.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Berk Gulmezoglu bgulmez@iastate.edu

More information: https://www.ece.iastate.edu/bgulmez/

Lund University was founded in 1666 and is repeatedly ranked among the world’s top 100 universities. The University has 40 000 students and more than 8 000 staff based in Lund, Helsingborg and Malmö.

The topic of the project is the study of the security of software implementations of cryptographic primitives and protocols. You will investigate attacks using side-channel leakage in software implementations, in particular libraries implementing current or future standard security protocols and cryptographic primitives such as OpenSSL. The focus can be on cache-timing attacks of different forms and will include both developing attacks as well as different protection methods, such as guaranteeing a constant-time implementation. It can also be on power analysis attacks on devices executing software and its protected implementations.

Work duties: The main duties involved in a post-doctoral position is to conduct research. Teaching may also be included, but up to no more than 20% of working hours. The position include the opportunity for three weeks of training in higher education teaching and learning.

Qualification requirements: Appointment to a post-doctoral position requires that the applicant has a PhD, or an international degree deemed equivalent to a PhD, within the subject of the position, completed no more than three years before the last date for applications. Under special circumstances, the doctoral degree can have been completed earlier.

Additional requirements: Very good oral and written proficiency in English. Publications in top conferences in the crypto and security community.

Terms of employment: This is a full-time, fixed-term employment of a maximum of 2 years with competitive salary (about 42kSEK per month before tax).

Last application date: 09.Nov.2020

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Thomas johansson (thomas@eit.lth.se)

More information: https://lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/jobID:357480/type:job/where:4/apply:1

Oblivious Transfer (OT) is a fundamental cryptographic protocol that finds a number of applications, in particular, as an essential building block for two-party and multi-party computation. We construct the first universally composable (UC) protocol for oblivious transfer secure against active static adversaries based on the Computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption. Our protocol is proven secure in the observable Global Random Oracle model. We start by constructing a protocol that realizes an OT functionality with a selective failure issue, but shown to be sufficient to instantiate efficient OT extension protocols. In terms of complexity, this protocol only requires the computation of 6 modular exponentiations and the communication of 5 group elements, five binary strings of security parameter length, and two binary strings of message length. Finally, we lift this weak construction to obtain a protocol that realizes the standard OT functionality (without any selective failures) at an additional cost of computing 9 modular exponentiations and communicating 4 group elements, four binary strings of security parameter length and two binary strings of message length. As an intermediate step before constructing our CDH based protocols, we design generic OT protocols from any OW-CPA secure public-key encryption scheme with certain properties, which could potentially be instantiated from more assumptions other than CDH.

Selfish mining (SM) attack (Eyal and Sirer, CACM ’13) endangered Proof-of-Work blockchains by allowing a rational mining pool with a hash power (&#945;) much less than 50% of the whole network to deviate from the honest mining algorithm and to steal from the fair shares of honest miners. Since then, the attack has been studied extensively in various settings, for understanding its interesting dynamics, optimizing it, and mitigating it. In this context, first, we propose generalized formulas for the calculation of revenue and profitability from SM-type attacks. Second, we propose two different SM-type attacks on the state-of-the-art mitigation algorithm “Freshness Preferred” (Heilman, FC ’14). Our Oracle mining attack works on the setting with forgeable timestamps (i.e., if timestamps are not generated by an authority) and our Bold mining attack works on the setting with both forgeable or unforgeable timestamps (i.e., even if an authority issues timestamps). Although the use of timestamps would be promising for selfish mining mitigation, the analyses of our attacks show that Freshness Preferred is quite vulnerable in the presence of rational miners, as any rational miner with &#945; >0 can directly benefit from our attacks. Third, we propose an SM mitigation algorithm Fortis with forgeable timestamps, which protects the honest miners’ shares against any attacker with &#945;<27.0% against all the known SM-type attacks.

I describe a blockchain design that hides the transaction graph from Blockchain Analyzers. The design is based on the realization that today the miner creating a block needs enough information to verify the validity of transactions, which makes details about the transactions public and thus allows blockchain analysis. Some protocols, such as Mimblewimble, obscure the transaction amounts but not the source of the funds which is enough to allow for analysis. The insight in this technical note is that the block creator can be restricted to the task of ensuring no double spends. The task of actually verifying transaction balances really belongs to the receiver. The receiver is the one motivated to verify that she is receiving a valid transaction output since she has to convince the next receiver that the balances are valid, otherwise no one will accept her spending transaction. The bulk of the transaction can thus be encrypted in such a manner that only the receiver can decrypt and examine it. Opening this transaction allows the receiver to also open previous transactions to allow her to work her way backward in a chain until she arrives at the coin generation blocks and completely verify the validity of the transaction. Since transactions are encrypted on the blockchain a blockchain analyzer cannot create a transaction graph until he is the receiver of a transaction that allows backward tracing through to some target transaction.

Basic key exchange protocols built from the learning with errors (LWE) assumption are insecure if secret keys are reused in the face of active attackers. One example of this is Fluhrer's attack on the Ding, Xie, and Lin (DXL) LWE key exchange protocol, which exploits leakage from the signal function for error correction. Protocols aiming to achieve security against active attackers generally use one of two techniques: demonstrating well-formed keyshares using re-encryption like in the Fujisaki--Okamoto transform; or directly combining multiple LWE values, similar to MQV-style Diffie--Hellman-based protocols.

In this work, we demonstrate improved and new attacks exploiting key reuse in several LWE-based key exchange protocols. First, we show how to greatly reduce the number of samples required to carry out Fluhrer's attack and reconstruct the secret period of a noisy square waveform, speeding up the attack on DXL key exchange by a factor of over 200. We show how to adapt this to attack a protocol of Ding, Branco, and Schmitt (DBS) designed to be secure with key reuse, breaking the claimed 128-bit security level in under a minute. We also apply our technique to a second authenticated key exchange protocol of DBS that uses an additive MQV design, although in this case our attack makes use of ephemeral key compromise powers of the eCK security model, which was not in scope of the claimed BR-model security proof. Our results show that building secure authenticated key exchange protocols directly from LWE remains a challenging and mostly open problem.

Cryptographic Primitives in Multivariate Public Key Cryptography are of relevant interest, specially in the quadratic case. These primitives classify the families of schemes that we encounter in this field. In this paper, the reader can find a new primitive based on the product of the roots of a polynomial over a field, where the coefficients of this polynomials are the elementary symmetric polynomials on $n$ variables, which guarantees a solution when inverting the scheme. Moreover, a cryptosystem and a digital signature scheme are built on top of this primitive, where distinct parametrizations and criteria that define the schemes are commented, along with applications of attacks available in literature.

Secure two-party computation considers the problem of two parties computing a joint function of their private inputs without revealing anything beyond the output of the computation. In this work, we take the first steps towards understanding the setting in which the two parties want to evaluate a joint quantum functionality while using only a classical communication channel between them. Our first result indicates that it is in general impossible to realize a two-party quantum functionality against malicious quantum adversaries with black-box simulation, relying only on classical channels. The negative result stems from reducing the existence of a black-box simulator to the existence of an extractor for classical proof of quantum knowledge, which in turn leads to violation of the quantum no-cloning.

Towards the positive results, we first introduce the notion of Oblivious Quantum Function Evaluation (OQFE). An OQFE is a two-party quantum cryptographic primitive with one fully classical party (Alice) whose input is (a classical description of a) quantum unitary, $U$, and a quantum party (Bob) whose input is a quantum state, $\psi$. In particular, Alice receives the classical output corresponding to the measurement of $U (\psi)$ while Bob receives no output. At the same time, the functionality guarantees that Bob remains oblivious to Alice's input $U$, while Alice learns nothing about $\psi$ more than what can be learned from the output of the computation. We present two concrete constructions, one secure against semi-honest parties and the other secure against malicious parties. Due to the no-go result mentioned above, we consider what is arguably the best possible notion obtainable in our model with respect to malicious adversaries: one-sided simulation security. This notion protects the input of one party (the quantum Bob) in the standard simulation-based sense, and protects the privacy of the other party's input (the classical Alice). We realize our protocol relying on the assumption of quantum secure injective homomorphic trapdoor one-way functions, which in turn rely on the learning with errors problem. As a result, we put forward a first, simple and modular construction of secure one-sided quantum two-party computation and quantum oblivious transfer over classical networks.

Multi-input functional encryption (MIFE) is a generalization of functional encryption and allows decryptor to learn only function values $f(x_{1},\ldots,x_{n})$ from ciphertexts of $x_{1},\ldots,x_{n}$. We present the first MIFE schemes for quadratic functions (MQFE) from pairings. We first observe that public-key MQFE can be obtained from inner product functional encryption in a relatively simple manner whereas obtaining secret-key MQFE from standard assumptions is completely nontrivial. The main contribution of this paper is to construct the first secret-key MQFE scheme that achieves indistinguishability-based selective security against unbounded collusion under the standard bilateral matrix Diffie-Hellman assumption. All previous MIFE schemes either support only inner products (linear functions) or rely on non-standard cryptographic assumptions such as indistinguishability obfuscation or multi-linear maps. Thus, our schemes are the first MIFE for functionality beyond linear functions from polynomial hardness of standard assumptions.

Physically unclonable functions (PUFs) are gaining attention as a promising cryptographic technique; the main applications using PUFs include challenge-response authentication and key generation (key storage). When a PUF is applied to these applications, min-entropy estimation is essential. Min-entropy is a measure of the lower bound of the unpredictability of PUF responses. A prominent scheme for estimating min-entropy is the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) specification (SP) 800-90B. It includes several statistical tests and ten kinds of estimators aimed at estimating the min-entropy of random number generators (RNGs). Several studies have estimated the min-entropy of PUFs as well as those of RNGs by using SP 800-90B. In this paper, we point out two problems in this scheme to estimate the min-entropy of PUFs. One is that the estimation results vary widely by the ordering of the PUF responses. The other is that the entropy estimation suite of SP 800-90B can overestimate PUF min-entropy. Both problems are related to the cause of lower entropy due to variations in the manufacturing of circuits and transistors (except for the PUF sources, which are circuits and transistors used to extract intrinsic physical properties and to generate device unique responses), named ``multiple sources.'' We call these circuits and transistors ``entropy-loss sources'' in contrast to the PUF sources. We applied three orderings to the PUF responses of our static random-access memory (SRAM) PUF and our complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor with a PUF (CIS PUF): row-direction ordering, column-direction ordering, and random-shuffle ordering. We demonstrated that the estimated min-entropy varies with the ordering. In particular, we found that arranging the PUF responses in readout order results in the overestimation of the min-entropy. We used numerical simulation to create numerical PUFs with the entropy-loss source. We demonstrated that the entropy estimation suite overestimates their entropy.

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We give a sieving algorithm for finding pairs of consecutive smooth numbers that utilizes solutions to the Prouhet-Tarry-Escott (PTE) problem. Any such solution induces two degree-$n$ polynomials, $a(x)$ and $b(x)$, that differ by a constant integer $C$ and completely split into linear factors in $\mathbb{Z}[x]$. It follows that for any $\ell \in \mathbb{Z}$ such that $a(\ell) \equiv b(\ell) \equiv 0 \bmod{C}$, the two integers $a(\ell)/C$ and $b(\ell)/C$ differ by 1 and necessarily contain $n$ factors of roughly the same size. For a fixed smoothness bound $B$, restricting the search to pairs of integers that are parameterized in this way increases the probability that they are $B$-smooth. Our algorithm combines a simple sieve with parametrizations given by a collection of solutions to the PTE problem.

The motivation for finding large twin smooth integers lies in their application to compact isogeny-based post-quantum protocols. The recent key exchange scheme B-SIDH and the recent digital signature scheme SQISign both require large primes that lie between two smooth integers; finding such a prime can be seen as a special case of finding twin smooth integers under the additional stipulation that their sum is a prime $p$.

When searching for cryptographic parameters with $2^{240} \leq p <2^{256}$, an implementation of our sieve found primes $p$ where $p+1$ and $p-1$ are $2^{15}$-smooth; the smoothest prior parameters had a similar sized prime for which $p-1$ and $p+1$ were $2^{19}$-smooth.

We propose a generic construction of two-message authenticated key exchange (AKE) in the quantum random oracle model (QROM). It can be seen as a QROM-secure version of X3LH-AKE [Xue et al. ASIACRYPT 2018], a generic AKE based on double-key PKE. We prove that, with some modification, the security of X3LH-AKE in QROM can be reduced to the one-way security of double-key PKE. In addition to answering several open problems on the QROM security of prior works, such as SIAKE [Xu et al. ASIACRYPT 2019], FSXY-AKE and 2Kyber-AKE, we propose a new construction, CSIAKE, based on commutative supersingular isogenies.

Our frame enjoys the following desirable features. First of all, it supports PKEs with non-perfect correctness. Secondly, the security reduction is relatively tight. In addition, the basic building block is weak and compact. Finally, the resulting AKE achieves the security in CK$^+$ model as strong as in X3LH-AKE, and the transformation overhead is low.

Secure group messaging protocols provide end-to-end encryption for group communication. Practical protocols face many challenges, including mobile devices frequently being offline, group members being added or removed, and the possibility of device compromises during long-lived chat sessions. Existing work targets a centralized network model in which all messages are routed through a single server, which is trusted to provide a consistent total order on updates to the the group state. In this paper we adapt secure group messaging for decentralized networks that have no central authority. Servers may still optionally be used, but their trust requirements are reduced.

We define decentralized continuous group key agreement (DCGKA), a new cryptographic primitive encompassing the core of a decentralized secure group messaging protocol; we give a practical construction of a DCGKA protocol and prove its security; and we describe how to construct a full messaging protocol from DCGKA. In the face of device compromise our protocol achieves forward secrecy and post-compromise security. We evaluate the performance of a prototype implementation, and demonstrate that our protocol has practical efficiency.

Efficient, leakage-free search on encrypted data has remained an unsolved problem for the last two decades; efficient schemes are vulnerable to leakage-abuse attacks, and schemes that eliminate leakage are impractical to deploy. To overcome this tradeoff, we reexamine the system model. We surveyed five companies providing end-to-end encrypted filesharing to better understand what they require from an encrypted search system. Based on our findings, we design and build DORY, an encrypted search system that addresses real-world requirements and layers on top of an existing end-to-end encrypted filesystem without adding any leakage. DORY splits trust between multiple servers in order to efficiently hide access patterns from a malicious attacker who controls all but one of the servers. We develop new cryptographic and systems techniques to meet the efficiency and trust model requirements outlined by the companies we surveyed. We implement DORY and show that it performs orders of magnitude better than a baseline built on ORAM. Parallelized across 8 servers, each with 16 CPUs, DORY takes 116ms to search roughly 50K documents and 862ms to search over 1M documents.

We introduce new tightly-secure authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocols that are extremely efficient, yet have only a constant security loss and can be instantiated in the random oracle model both from the standard DDH assumption and a subgroup assumption over RSA groups. These protocols can be deployed with optimal parameters, independent of the number of users or sessions, without the need to compensate a security loss with increased parameters and thus decreased computational efficiency. We use the standard “Single-Bit-Guess” AKE security (with forward secrecy and state corruption) requiring all challenge keys to be simultaneously pseudo-random. In contrast, most previous papers on tightly secure AKE protocols (Bader et al., TCC 2015; Gjøsteen and Jager, CRYPTO 2018; Liu et al., ASIACRYPT 2020) concentrated on a non-standard “Multi-Bit-Guess” AKE security which is known not to compose tightly with symmetric primitives to build a secure communication channel. Our key technical contribution is a new generic approach to construct tightly-secure AKE protocols based on non-committing key encapsulation mechanisms. The resulting DDH-based protocols are considerably more efficient than all previous constructions.

We present implementations of the lattice-based digital signature scheme Dilithium for ARM Cortex-M3 and ARM Cortex-M4. Dilithium is one of the three signature finalists of the NIST post-quantum cryptography competition. As our Cortex-M4 target, we use the popular STM32F407-DISCOVERY development board. Compared to the previous speed records on the Cortex-M4 by Ravi, Gupta, Chattopadhyay, and Bhasin we speed up the key operations NTT and $\text{NTT}^{&#8722;1}$ by 20% which together with other optimizations results in speedups of 7%, 15%, and 9% for Dilithium3 key generation, signing, and verification respectively. We also present the first constant-time Dilithium implementation on the Cortex-M3 and use the Arduino Due for benchmarks. For Dilithium3, we achieve on average 2 562 kilocycles for key generation, 10 667 kilocycles for signing, and 2 321 kilocycles for verification. Additionally, we present stack consumption optimizations applying to both our CortexM3 and Cortex-M4 implementation. Due to the iterative nature of the Dilithium signing algorithm, there is no optimal way to achieve the best speed and lowest stack consumption at the same time. We present three different strategies for the signing procedure which allow trading more stack and flash memory for faster speed or vice-versa. Our implementation of Dilithium3 with the smallest memory footprint uses less than 12kB. As an additional output of this work, we present the first Cortex-M3 implementations of the key-encapsulation schemes NewHope and Kyber.