IACR News
Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:
06 August 2021
Fujitsu Research, Sunnyvale CA
Job PostingFujitsu is hiring research engineers for our research lab based out of Sunnyvale, CA. We are looking for skilled developers with a research background who enjoy building systems and helping to write academic papers about them. This job will have a large open-source component, so someone who is comfortable working in the open-source space would be an ideal candidate. The role offers flexible office time with the potential to work from home for a large fraction of your time.
Job Responsibilities:- Design and develop secure blockchain and blockchain-based systems, and write academic papers about them when possible.
- Assist in the creation and maintenance of blockchain open-source projects, and help with research projects based on them. Engage and participate in the open-source blockchain community.
- Help developers build your research systems into production-ready systems.
- Collaborate with researchers both within and outside of Fujitsu to work towards building cutting-edge systems.
- A master’s degree in computer science or a related field, or relevant experience in research and development
- Some track record of research publications. We don’t expect you to publish every year in top venues, but we do want evidence of familiarity with research.
- Experience in open-source development, or a willingness to learn.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Hart Montgomery (hmontgomery@fujitsu.com)
Fujitsu Research, Sunnyvale CA
Job PostingFujitsu is hiring strong cryptographic researchers for our research lab based out of Sunnyvale, CA. We are looking for researchers who can successfully publish in top venues, collaborate with others in industry and academia, and evangelize cryptography and security within Fujitsu. The role offers flexible office time (including the potential to mostly work from home) and could be fully remote for exceptionally strong candidates.
Job Responsibilities:- Conduct research in cryptography and related fields (i.e. distributed systems, security, and general theory) and publish it in top conferences. While researchers have wide latitude to work on whatever problems they deem interesting in the field, we do expect that at least some portion of research time will be spent on problems that are more relevant to Fujitsu’s business.
- Collaborate with others in both academia and industry on exciting research problems. Promote Fujitsu as a leader in the field of cryptography and computer security.
- Contribute to new Fujitsu technologies and IP, and help research engineers and developers shepherd the “practical” portion of your research into new business offerings.
- Ph.D. in computer science or a related field.
- A strong track record of publishing in top conferences in cryptography and related fields.
- A vision for the future direction of your research and ideas for how it can be impactful both academically and on Fujitsu’s business.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Hart Montgomery (hmontgomery@fujitsu.com)
University College Cork, Ireland
Job PostingThe school strategy is to expand its research and teaching in the area of Cybersecurity and candidates with such expertise are encouraged to apply. The School seeks to appoint a committed computer science academic, a dynamic and thoughtful individual who will contribute to its research-led teaching ethos and research agenda.
The School of CSIT has 32 full-time academic staff and offers degrees at bachelors, masters and doctoral level. It offers a welcoming and open working environment, with excellent administrative and technical support, and an inclusive collegiate experience. Academic staff in the school have leadership roles in major national and international research initiatives, including the SFI funded research centers CONNECT (Future Networks and Communications), CONFIRM (Smart Manufacturing), Insight (Data Analytics), LERO (Irish Software Research Centre), and the SFI research spokes BAV (Blended Autonomous Vehicles) and ENABLE (Smart Communities). In addition, school academics lead and host the SFI Centre for Research Training in Advanced Networks for Sustainable Societies and the SFI Centre for Research Training in Artificial Intelligence. The Cork area is home to a cybersecurity cluster of about 25 companies, including multinationals that are well-known for their security products and services, many of whom the School engages with for student internships, research sponsorship and collaboration.
Appointment may be made on the internationally competitive Lectureship (Above the Bar) Salary Scale: €67,073 - €86,241. The position is permanent, with tenure subject to successful completion of the probation and establishment periods.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Informal enquiries can be made, in confidence, to the Head of School, Prof. Cormac J. Sreenan, head@cs.ucc.ie
Applications must be submitted online via the University College Cork vacancy portal (https://ore.ucc.ie/) before 16-Sep-2021 12:00 (noon) Irish time.
More information: https://my.corehr.com/pls/uccrecruit/erq_jobspec_version_4.jobspec?p_id=048051
Diego F. Aranha, Elena Pagnin, Francisco Rodríguez-Henríquez
ePrint ReportClaude Carlet, Sylvain Guilley, Sihem Mesnager
ePrint ReportSeveral such protections have been proposed in the past and already cryptanalyzed thanks to a complete WBC scheme analysis. In this article, we study a particular pattern for local protection (which can be leveraged for robust WBC); we formalize it as DIBO (for Diffused-Input-Blocked-Output). This notion has been explored (albeit without having been nicknamed DIBO) in previous works. However, we notice that guidelines to adequately select the invertible diffusion $\phi$ and the blocked bijections $B$ were missing. Therefore, all choices for $\phi$ and $B$ were assumed as suitable. Actually, we show that most configurations can be attacked, and we even give mathematical proof for the attack. The cryptanalysis tool is the number of zeros in a Walsh-Hadamard spectrum. This ``spectral distinguisher'' improves on top of the previously known one (Sasdrich, Moradi, G{\"{u}}neysu, at FSE 2016). However, we show that such an attack does not work always (even if it works most of the time).
Therefore, on the defense side, we give a straightforward rationale for the WBC implementations to be secure against such spectral attacks: the random diffusion part $\phi$ shall be selected such that the rank of each restriction to bytes is full. In AES's case, this seldom happens if $\phi$ is selected at random as a linear bijection of $\F_2^{32}$. Thus, specific care shall be taken. Notice that the entropy of the resulting $\phi$ (suitable for WBC against spectral attacks) is still sufficient to design acceptable WBC schemes.
Kai Gellert, Tibor Jager, Lin Lyu, Tom Neuschulten
ePrint ReportPrior research has established the general perspective that a length-hiding padding which is long enough to improve security significantly incurs an unfeasibly large bandwidth overhead. We argue that this perspective is a consequence of the choice of the security models considered in prior works, which are based on classical indistinguishability of two messages, and that this does not reflect the attacker model of typical fingerprinting attacks well. Furthermore, these models also consider a model where the attacker is restricted to choosing messages of bounded length difference, depending on a given length-hiding padding of the encryption scheme. This restriction seems difficult to enforce in practice, because application layer protocols are typically unaware of the concrete length-hiding padding applied by an underlying encryption protocol, such as TLS. We also do not want to make application-layer messages dependent on the underlying encryption scheme, but instead want to provide length hiding encryption that satisfies the requirements of the given application.
Therefore we propose a new perspective on length hiding encryption, which aims to capture security against fingerprinting attacks more accurately. This makes it possible to concretely quantify the security provided by length-hiding padding against fingerprinting attacks, depending on the real message distribution of an application. We find that for many real-world applications (such as webservers with static content, DNS requests, Google search terms, or Wikipedia page visits) and their specific message distributions, even length-hiding padding with relatively small bandwidth overhead of only 2-5% can already significantly improve security against fingerprinting attacks. This gives rise to a new perspective on length-hiding encryption, which helps understanding how and under what conditions length-hiding encryption can be used to improve security.
Yang Wang, Yanmin Zhao, Mingqiang Wang
ePrint ReportDaniel Escudero, Eduardo Soria-Vazquez
ePrint ReportMost of our work is devoted to the case where the elements of $A$ do not commute with all of $R$, but they just commute with each other. For such rings, the secret sharing scheme cannot be linear ``on both sides" and furthermore it is not multiplicative. Nevertheless, we are still able to build MPC protocols with a concretely efficient online phase and black-box access to $R$. As an example we consider the ring $\mathcal{M}_{m\times m}(\mathbb{Z}/2^k\mathbb{Z})$, for which when $m > \log(n+1)$, we obtain protocols that require around $\lceil\log(n+1)\rceil/2$ less communication and $2\lceil\log(n+1)\rceil$ less computation than the state of the art protocol based on Circuit Amortization Friendly Encodings (Dalskov, Lee and Soria-Vazquez, ASIACRYPT 2020).
In this setting with a ``less commutative" $A$, our black-box preprocessing phase has a less practical complexity of $\poly(n)$. Due to this, we additionally provide specialized, concretely efficient preprocessing protocols for $R = \mathcal{M}_{m\times m}(\mathbb{Z}/2^k\mathbb{Z})$ that exploit the structure of the matrix ring.
Wai-Kong Lee, Kyungbae Jang, Gyeongju Song, Hyunji Kim, Seong Oun Hwang, Hwajeong Seo
ePrint ReportLuca De Feo, Samuel Dobson, Steven D. Galbraith, Lukas Zobernig
ePrint ReportPaul Grubbs, Arasu Arun, Ye Zhang, Joseph Bonneau, Michael Walfish
ePrint ReportTendayi Kamucheka, Michael Fahr, Tristen Teague, Alexander Nelson, David Andrews, Miaoqing Huang
ePrint ReportShay Gueron, Edoardo Persichetti, Paolo Santini
ePrint ReportSofía Celi, Armando Faz-Hernández, Nick Sullivan, Goutam Tamvada, Luke Valenta, Thom Wiggers, Bas Westerbaan, and Christopher A. Wood
ePrint ReportFuyuki Kitagawa, Ryo Nishimaki, Keisuke Tanaka
ePrint ReportIn addition, we also study the relation of collusion-resistance and succinctness for SKFE. Functional encryption is said to be weakly succinct if the size of its encryption circuit is sub-linear in the size of functions. We show that collusion-resistant SKFE can be constructed from weakly succinct SKFE supporting only one functional key.
By combining the above two results, we show that IO for all circuits can be constructed from weakly succinct SKFE supporting only one functional key.
Zezhou Hou, Jiongjiong Ren, Shaozhen Chen
ePrint ReportIn this paper, we propose a new algorithm and model to improve neural distinguishers in terms of accuracy and the number of rounds and present effective neural aided attack on large-size block ciphers. First, we design an algorithm based on SAT to improve neural distinguishers. With the help of SAT/SMT solver, we obtain new effective neural distinguishers of SIMON using the input differences of high-probability differential characteristics. Second, we propose a new neural distinguisher model using multiple output differences. Inspired by Benamira's work and data augmentation in deep learning, we use the output differences to exploit more derived features and train neural distinguishers, by splicing output differences into a matrix as a sample. Based on the new model, we construct neural distinguishers of SIMON and Speck with round and accuracy promotion. Utilizing our neural distinguishers, we can distinguish reduced-round NSA block ciphers from pseudo-random permutation better. Moreover, we perform practical key recovery attacks on different versions of SIMON. For SIMON32/64 and SIMON48/96, we append additional 2-round optimal characteristics searched by SAT/SMT solver to the beginning of our neural distinguishers and attack 13-round SIMON32/64, 14-round SIMON48/96 using Gohr's key recovery frame. For SIMON64/128, it costs too much time in precomputation, especially in wrong key response profile, which is unbearable for most of researchers. However, we show with experiments that the distribution of the wrong key profile is pseudo-periodic. Based on this, we make use of partial wrong key profile to describe the whole wrong key response profile, and then propose a generic key recovery attack scheme which can attack large-size block ciphers. As an application, we perform a key recovery attack on 13-round SIMON64/128 using a 11-round neural distinguisher. All our results are confirmed with experiments (source code available online).
Juan Carlos Garcia-Escartin, Vincent Gimeno, Julio José Moyano-Fernández
ePrint ReportHyeokdong Kwon, Hyunjun Kim, Minjoo Sim, Wai-Kong Lee, Hwajeong Seo
ePrint ReportNusrat Farzana, Farimah Farahmandi, Mark Tehranipoor
ePrint ReportErik-Oliver Blass, Florian Kerschbaum, Travis Mayberry
ePrint ReportTo this end, we initiate the study of Iterative Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions (iOPRFs), new primitives providing two-sided, fully malicious security for these types of applications. We present a first, efficient iOPRF construction secure against both malicious clients and servers in the standard model, based on the DDH assumption. We demonstrate that iOPRFs are useful to implement different interesting applications, including an RFID authentication protocol and a protocol for private evaluation of outsourced decision trees. Finally, we implement and evaluate our full iOPRF construction and show that it is efficient in practice.