IACR News
Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:
14 January 2021
University of Surrey, UK
Job PostingUniversity of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom This PhD position is funded for EU and UK students, and the application deadline is on the 24th of January 2021. Overseas applicants are welcome to apply but will have to cover the difference in Overseas Tuition Fees.
The aim of the PhD is to design and analyse electronic-voting systems that can be deployed in real-life, by looking at combinations between desirable e-voting guarantees (e.g. privacy, receipt-freeness, collusion resistance, verifiability, accountability, etc) and techniques of executing protocols on untrusted platforms. A secondary aim is to certify the security of these systems using formal-analysis tools. The position is under the supervision of Dr. Catalin Dragan and Prof. Steve Schneider.
This position is fully funded, with a stipend of 16 000 GBP per year, and successful applicants are expected to start in April 2021.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Catalin Dragan c.dragan@surrey.ac.uk
More information: https://www.surrey.ac.uk/fees-and-funding/studentships/phd-studentships-computer-science
Manta network
Job PostingBelow are good to have skills:
- System level programming using Rust or C/C++
- Familiar with low level system internals and network stack
- Basic knowledge of Cryptographic primitives, such as public key encryption
- Knowledge on distributed system and consensus algorithms
- Familiar with database and storage system
- Boston
- remote
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Shumo Chu
More information: https://manta.network/
Algorand
Job PostingFounded by cryptography pioneer Silvio Micali, Algorand fulfills the promise of blockchain through a first-of-its-kind transaction platform that solves the “blockchain trilemma” by offering true decentralization, scalability, and security.
We are looking for a Postdoctoral Cryptography Researcher. This is an opportunity for someone who is excited by new technologies to influence the design and implementation of advanced cryptographic systems and protocols.The Researcher will design cryptographic protocols and partner with the team to develop prototypes. Researchers are also internal subject matter experts, providing guidance to our extended staff, and are also responsible for publishing meaningful research.
Overseen by Chris Peikert, this opportunity is for one (1) year with the possibility for extension.
Core Responsibilities
- Theoretical Focus: Design advanced cryptographic systems and protocols
- Applied Focus: Prototype/build and optimize cryptographic systems and protocols
- Partner with the larger organization on implementations
- Publish meaningful research, both individually and with staff members
- Be part of an inclusive environment that fosters collaboration and creativity both internally and externally
Requirements
- PhD in Cryptography, Computer Science, or related field
- Experience in the following: cryptographic primitives, protocols, and proof systems; post-quantum cryptography preferred
- Publication in top cryptography or security venues
- Open source library contribution or cutting edge implementation experience for applied-focused applicants
- Appreciation for considerations beyond cryptography, such as networking, systems, and performance
- Good written communication and ability to communicate technical information with wide variety of audiences
- Experience in participating in the implementation of complex systems designs preferred
- Enthusiasm for working in a highly collaborative, fast-paced, and dynamic environment
Postdocs receive competitive salary and benefits, as well as a WFH technology package (computer and home
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Regina OBrien
More information: https://jobapply.page.link/TNVg
University of Warsaw
Job PostingMIM UW is one of the strongest computer science faculties in Europe. It is known for talented students (e.g., two wins and 14 times in top ten at the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest) and strong research teams, especially in algorithms, logic and automata and computational biology. There is also a growing number of successful smaller groups in areas like cryptography, game theory, distributed systems, machine learning and others. There are five ERC grants in computer science running at MIM UW at the moment.
In the current call, the position is offered in two variants (follow the links for details):
- a standard position
- a position with reduced teaching load (120hrs/year) and increased salary
Deadline for applications: 12th February, 2021.
More details, including application procedure can be found under the following links:
- https://www.mimuw.edu.pl/sites/default/files/konkursy/wmim_1210_ek_03_2021_en.pdf
- https://www.mimuw.edu.pl/sites/default/files/konkursy/wmim_1210_ek_01_2021_en.pdf
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Prof. Łukasz Kowalik (kowalik@mimuw.edu.pl)
More information: https://www.mimuw.edu.pl/sites/default/files/konkursy/wmim_1210_ek_03_2021_en.pdf
12 January 2021
Ishtiyaque Ahmad, Yuntian Yang, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi, Trinabh Gupta
ePrint ReportMadhurima Mukhopadhyay, Palash Sarkar
ePrint ReportAlexander Russell, Qiang Tang, Moti Yung, Hong-Sheng Zhou, Jiadong Zhu
ePrint ReportWe prove that a simple construction can transform a subverted random oraclewhich disagrees with the original one at a small fraction of inputsinto an object that is indifferentiable from a random function, even if the adversary is made aware of all randomness used in the transformation. Our results permit future designers of cryptographic primitives in typical kleptographic settings (i.e., those permitting adversaries that subvert or replace basic cryptographic algorithms) to use random oracles as a trusted black box.
Panos Kampanakis, Peter Panburana, Michael Curcio, Chirag Shroff, Md Mahbub Alam
ePrint ReportAny Muanalifah, Serge˘ı Sergeev
ePrint ReportJung Hee Cheon, Yongha Son, Donggeon Yhee
ePrint ReportLuke Champine
ePrint ReportAein Rezaei Shahmirzadi, Dusan Bozilov, Amir Moradi
ePrint ReportNiluka Amarasinghe, Xavier Boyen, Matthew McKague
ePrint ReportIn this study, we introduce such a common framework to evaluate the nature and extent of anonymity in (crypto)currencies and distributed transaction systems, irrespective of their implementation. As such, our work lays the foundation for formalising security models and terminology across a wide range of anonymity notions referenced in the literature, while showing how ``anonymity'' itself is a surprisingly nuanced concept.
Ori Rottenstreich
ePrint ReportNishanth Chandran, Divya Gupta, Akash Shah
ePrint ReportIn this work, we construct Circuit-PSI protocols with linear computational and communication cost. Further, our protocols are concretely more efficient than $\mathsf{PSTY}$ -- we are $\approx 2.3\times$ more communication efficient and are up to $2.8\times$ faster in LAN and WAN network settings. We obtain our improvements through a new primitive called Relaxed Batch Oblivious Programmable Pseudorandom Functions ($\mathsf{RB\text{-}OPPRF}$) that can be seen as a strict generalization of Batch $\mathsf{OPPRF}$s in $\mathsf{PSTY}$. While using Batch $\mathsf{OPPRF}$s, in the context of Circuit-PSI results, in protocols with super-linear computational complexity, we construct $\mathsf{RB\text{-}OPPRF}$s that can be used to build linear cost and concretely efficient Circuit-PSI protocols. We believe that the $\mathsf{RB\text{-}OPPRF}$ primitive could be of independent interest. As another contribution, we provide more communication efficient protocols (than prior works) for the task of private set membership -- a primitive used in many PSI protocols including ours.
Zi-Yuan Liu, Yi-Fan Tseng, Raylin Tso, Masahiro Mambo, Yu-Chi Chen
ePrint ReportPouriya Alikhani, Nicolas Brunner, Claude Crépeau, Sébastien Designolle, Raphaël Houlmann, Weixu Shi, Hugo Zbinden
ePrint ReportAlexandru-Ștefan Gheorghieș, Darius-Marian Lăzăroi, Emil Simion
ePrint ReportJonathan Lee, Srinath Setty, Justin Thaler, Riad Wahby
ePrint ReportWe further observe that one can render the aforementioned SNARK zero knowledge and reduce the proof size and verifier time to polylogarithmic---while maintaining a linear-time prover---by outsourcing the verifier's work via one layer of proof composition with an existing zkSNARK as the ``outer'' proof system. A similar result was recently obtained by Bootle, Chiesa, and Liu (ePrint 2020/1527).
Thomas Schneider, Oleksandr Tkachenko
ePrint ReportIn this paper, we introduce EPISODE - a highly efficient privacy-preserving protocol for Similar Sequence Queries (SSQs), which can be used for finding genetically similar individuals in an outsourced genomic database, i.e., securely aggregated from data of multiple institutions. Our SSQ protocol is based on the edit distance approximation by Asharov et al. (PETS'18), which we further optimize and extend to the outsourcing scenario. We improve their protocol by using more efficient building blocks and achieve a 5-6x run-time improvement compared to their work in the same two-party scenario.
Recently, Cheng et al. (ASIACCS'18) introduced protocols for outsourced SSQs that rely on homomorphic encryption. Our new protocol outperforms theirs by more than factor 24000x in terms of run-time in the same setting and guarantees the same level of security. In addition, we show that our algorithm scales for practical database sizes by querying a database that contains up to a million short sequences within a few minutes, and a database with hundreds of whole-genome sequences containing 75 million alleles each within a few hours.