International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We introduce policy-compliant signatures (PCS). A PCS scheme can be used in a setting where a central authority determines a global policy and distributes public and secret keys associated with sets of attributes to the users in the system. If two users, Alice and Bob, have attribute sets that jointly satisfy the global policy, Alice can use her secret key and Bob's public key to sign a message. Unforgeability ensures that a valid signature can only be produced if Alice's secret key is known and if the policy is satisfied. Privacy guarantees that the public keys and produced signatures reveal nothing about the users' attributes beyond whether they satisfy the policy or not. PCS extends the functionality provided by existing primitives such as attribute-based signatures and policy-based signatures, which do not consider a designated receiver and thus cannot include the receiver's attributes in the policies. We describe practical applications of PCS which include controlling transactions in financial systems with strong privacy guarantees (avoiding additional trusted entities that check compliance), as well as being a tool for trust negotiations.

We introduce an indistinguishability-based privacy notion for PCS and present a generic and modular scheme based on standard building blocks such as signatures, non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs, and a (predicate-only) predicate encryption scheme. We show that it can be instantiated to obtain an efficient scheme that is provably secure under standard pairing-assumptions for a wide range of policies. We further model PCS in UC by describing the goal of PCS as an enhanced ideal signature functionality which gives rise to a simulation-based privacy notion for PCS. We show that our generic scheme achieves this composable security notion under the additional assumption that the underlying predicate encryption scheme satisfies a stronger, fully adaptive, simulation-based attribute-hiding notion.

We propose to use blockchains to achieve MPC which does not require the participating parties to be online simultaneously or interact with each other. Parties who contribute inputs but do not wish to receive outputs can go offline after submitting a single message. In addition to our main result, we study combined communication- and state-complexity in MPC, as it has implications for the communication complexity of our main construction. Finally, we provide a variation of our main protocol which additionally provides guaranteed output delivery.

A number of arithmetization-oriented ciphers emerge for use in advanced cryptographic protocols such as secure multi-party computation (MPC), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) in recent years. The standard block ciphers like AES and the hash functions SHA2/SHA3 are proved to be efficient in software and hardware but not optimal to use in this field, for this reason, new kind of cryptographic primitives were proposed recently. However, unlike traditional ones, there is no standard approach to design and analyze such block ciphers and the hash functions, therefore their security analysis needs to be done carefully. In 2018, StarkWare launched a public STARK-Friendly Hash (SFH) Challenge to select an efficient and secure hash function to be used within ZK-STARKs, transparent and post-quantum secure proof systems. The block cipher JARVIS is one of the first ciphers designed for STARK applications but, shortly after its publication, the cipher has been shown vulnerable to Gröbner basis attack. This paper aims to describe a Gröbner basis attack on new block ciphers, MiMC, GMiMCerf (SFH candidates) and the variants of JARVIS. We present the complexity of Gröbner basis attack on JARVIS-like ciphers. Then we give results from our experiments for the attack on reduced-round MiMC and a structure we found in the Gröbner basis attack for GMiMCerf.

The term miner extractable value (MEV) has been coined to describe the value which can be extracted by a miner from manipulating the order of transactions within a given timeframe. MEV has been deemed an important factor to assess the overall economic stability of a cryptocurrency. This stability also influences the economically rational choice of the security parameter k, by which a merchant defines the number of required confirmation blocks in cryptocurrencies based on Nakamoto consensus. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, currently no exact definition of MEV exists. In this paper, we provide a definition in accordance to its usage throughout the community and show that a narrow definition of MEV fails to capture the extractable value of other actors like users. Moreover, we show that there is no globally unique MEV which can readily be determined. We further highlight why it is hard, or even impossible, to estimate extractable value precisely, considering the uncertainties in real world systems. Finally, we outline a peculiar yet straightforward technique for choosing the security parameter k, which can act as a workaround to transfer the risk of an insufficiently chosen k to another merchant.

We propose the first maliciously secure multi-party computation (MPC) protocol for general functionalities in two rounds, without any trusted setup. Since polynomial-time simulation is impossible in two rounds, we achieve the relaxed notion of superpolynomial-time simulation security [Pass, EUROCRYPT 2003]. Prior to our work, no such maliciously secure protocols were known even in the two-party setting for functionalities where both parties receive outputs. Our protocol is based on the sub-exponential security of standard assumptions plus a special type of non-interactive non-malleable commitment.

At the heart of our approach is a two-round multi-party conditional disclosure of secrets (MCDS) protocol in the plain model from bilinear maps, which is constructed from techniques introduced in [Benhamouda and Lin, TCC 2020].

We revisit one of the most fundamental hardness amplification constructions, originally proposed by Yao (FOCS 1982). We present a hardness amplification theorem for the direct product of certain games that is simpler, more general, and stronger than previously known hardness amplification theorems of the same kind. Our focus is two-fold. First, we aim to provide close-to-optimal concrete bounds, as opposed to asymptotic ones. Second, in the spirit of abstraction and reusability, our goal is to capture the essence of direct product hardness amplification as generally as possible. Furthermore, we demonstrate how our amplification theorem can be applied to obtain hardness amplification results for non-trivial interactive cryptographic games such as MAC forgery or signature forgery games.

Robust (fuzzy) extractors are very useful for, e.g., authenticated key exchange from a shared weak secret and remote biometric authentication against active adversaries. They enable two parties to extract the same uniform randomness with a ``helper'' string. More importantly, they have an authentication mechanism built in that tampering of the ``helper'' string will be detected. Unfortunately, as shown by Dodis and Wichs, in the information-theoretic setting, a robust extractor for an $(n,k)$-source requires $k>n/2$, which is in sharp contrast with randomness extractors which only require $k=\omega(\log n)$. Existing works either rely on random oracles or introduce CRS and work only for CRS-independent sources (even in the computational setting).

In this work, we give a systematic study about robust (fuzzy) extractors for general CRS {\em dependent} sources. We show in the information-theoretic setting, the same entropy lower bound holds even in the CRS model; we then show we {\em can} have robust extractors in the computational setting for general CRS-dependent source that is only with minimal entropy. We further extend our construction to robust fuzzy extractors. Along the way, we propose a new primitive called $\kappa$-MAC, which is unforgeable with a weak key and hides all partial information about the key (both against auxiliary input); it may be of independent interests.

Encrypted multi-maps enable outsourcing the storage of a multi-map to an untrusted server while maintaining the ability to query privately. We focus on encrypted Boolean multi-maps that support arbitrary Boolean queries over the multi-map. Kamara and Moataz [Eurocrypt’17] presented the first encrypted multi-map, BIEX, that supports CNF queries with optimal communication, worst-case sublinear search time and non-trivial leakage.

We improve on previous work by presenting a new construction CNFFilter for CNF queries with significantly less leakage than BIEX, while maintaining both optimal communication and worst-case sublinear search time. As a direct consequence our construction shows additional resistance to leakage-abuse attacks in comparison to prior works. For most CNF queries, CNFFilter avoids leaking the result sets for any singleton queries for labels appearing in the CNF query. As an example, for the CNF query of the form (l1 ∨ l2) ∧ l3, our scheme does not leak the result sizes of queries to l1, l2 or l3 individually. On the other hand, BIEX does leak some of this information. This is just an example of the reduced leakage obtained by CNFFilter. The core of CNFFilter is a new filtering algorithm that performs set intersections with significantly less leakage compared to prior works.

We implement CNFFilter and show that CNFFilter achieves faster search times and similar communication overhead compared to BIEX at the cost of a small increase in server storage.

We present a construction of indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) that relies on the learning with errors (LWE) assumption together with a new notion of succinctly sampling pseudo-random LWE samples. We then present a candidate LWE sampler whose security is related to the hardness of solving systems of polynomial equations. Our construction improves on the recent iO candidate of Wee and Wichs (Eurocrypt 2021) in two ways: first, we show that a much weaker and simpler notion of LWE sampling suffices for iO; and secondly, our candidate LWE sampler is secure based on a compactly specified and falsifiable assumption about random polynomials, with a simple error distribution that facilitates cryptanalysis.

Determining the exact algebraic structure or some partial information of the superpoly for a given cube is a necessary step in the cube attack -- a generic cryptanalytic technique for symmetric-key primitives with some secret and public tweakable inputs. Currently, the division property based approach is the most powerful tool for exact superpoly recovery. However, as the algebraic normal form (ANF) of the targeted output bit gets increasingly complicated as the number of rounds grows, existing methods for superpoly recovery quickly hit their bottlenecks. For example, previous method stuck at round 842, 190, and 892 for Trivium, Grain-128AEAD, and Kreyvium, respectively. In this paper, we propose a new framework for recovering the exact ANFs of massive superpolies based on the monomial prediction technique (ASIACRYPT 2020, an alternative language for the division property). In this framework, the targeted output bit is first expressed as a polynomial of the bits of some intermediate states. For each term appearing in the polynomial, the monomial prediction technique is applied to determine its superpoly if the corresponding MILP model can be solved within a preset time limit. Terms unresolved within the time limit are further expanded as polynomials of the bits of some deeper intermediate states with symbolic computation, whose terms are again processed with monomial predictions. The above procedure is iterated until all terms are resolved. Finally, all the sub-superpolies are collected and assembled into the superpoly of the targeted bit. We apply the new framework to Trivium, Grain-128AEAD, and Kreyvium. As a result, the exact ANFs of the superpolies for 843-, 844- and 845-round Trivium, 191-round Grain-128AEAD and 894-round Kreyvium are recovered. Moreover, with help of the M\"{o}bius transform, we present a novel key-recovery technique based on superpolies involving all key bits by exploiting the sparse structures, which leads to the best key-recovery attacks on the targets considered.

Digital hardware Trojans are integrated circuits whose implementation differ from the specification in an arbitrary and malicious way. For example, the circuit can differ from its specified input/output behavior after some fixed number of queries (known as ``time bombs'') or on some particular input (known as ``cheat codes'').

To detect such Trojans, countermeasures using multiparty computation (MPC) or verifiable computation (VC), have been proposed. On a high level, to realize a circuit with specification $\cF$ one has more sophisticated circuits $\cF^\diamond$ manufactured (where $\cF^\diamond$ specifies a MPC or VC of $\cF$), and then embeds these $\cF^\diamond$'s into a \emph{master circuit} which must be trusted but is relatively simple compared to $\cF$. Those solutions have a significant overhead as $\cF^\diamond$ is significantly more complex than $\cF$ and also the master circuits are not exactly trivial either.

In this work, we show that in restricted settings, where $\cF$ has no evolving state and is queried on independent inputs, we can achieve a relaxed security notion using very simple constructions. In particular, we do not change the specification of the circuit at all (i.e., $\cF=\cF^\diamond$). Moreover the master circuit basically just queries a subset of its manufactured circuits and checks if they're all the same.

The security we achieve guarantees that, if the manufactured circuits are initially tested on up to $T$ inputs, the master circuit will catch Trojans that try to deviate on significantly more than a $1/T$ fraction of the inputs. This bound is optimal for the type of construction considered, and we provably achieve it using a construction where $12$ instantiations of $\cF$ need to be embedded into the master. We also discuss an extremely simple construction with just $2$ instantiations for which we conjecture that it already achieves the optimal bound.

Secure multiparty computation (MPC) enables $n$ parties, of which up to $t$ may be corrupted, to perform joint computations on their private inputs while revealing only the outputs. Optimizing the asymptotic and concrete costs of MPC protocols has become an important line of research. Much of this research focuses on the setting of an honest majority, where $n \ge 2t+1$, which gives rise to concretely efficient protocols that are either information-theoretic or make a black-box use of symmetric cryptography. Efficiency can be further improved in the case of a {\em strong} honest majority, where $n>2t+1$.

Motivated by the goal of minimizing the communication and latency costs of MPC with a strong honest majority, we make two related contributions. \begin{itemize}[leftmargin=*] \item {\bf Generalized pseudorandom secret sharing (PRSS).} Linear correlations serve as an important resource for MPC protocols and beyond. PRSS enables secure generation of many pseudorandom instances of such correlations without interaction, given replicated seeds of a pseudorandom function. We extend the PRSS technique of Cramer et al.\ (TCC 2015) for sharing degree-$d$ polynomials to new constructions leveraging a particular class of combinatorial designs. Our constructions yield a dramatic efficiency improvement when the degree $d$ is higher than the security threshold $t$, not only for standard degree-$d$ correlations but also for several useful generalizations. In particular, correlations for locally converting between slot configurations in ``share packing'' enable us to avoid the concrete overhead of prior works.

\item {\bf Cheap straggler resilience.} In reality, communication is not fully synchronous: protocol executions suffer from variance in communication delays and occasional node or message-delivery failures. We explore the benefits of PRSS-based MPC with a strong honest majority toward robustness against such failures, in turn yielding improved latency delays. In doing so we develop a novel technique for defending against a subtle ``double-dipping'' attack, which applies to the best existing protocols, with almost no extra cost in communication or rounds.

\end{itemize}

Combining the above tools requires further work, including new methods for batch verification via distributed zero-knowledge proofs (Boneh et al., CRYPTO 2019) that apply to packed secret sharing. Overall, our work demonstrates new advantages of the strong honest majority setting, and introduces new tools---in particular, generalized PRSS---that we believe will be of independent use within other cryptographic applications.

hNIST's PQC standardization process is in the third round, and a first final choice between one of three remaining lattice-based key encapsulation mechanisms is expected by the end of 2021. This makes studying the implementation-security aspect of the candidates a pressing matter. However, while the development of side-channel attacks and corresponding countermeasures has seen continuous interest, fault attacks are still a vastly underdeveloped field.

In fact, a first practical fault attack on lattice-based KEMs was demonstrated just very recently by Pessl and Prokop. However, while their attack can bypass some standard fault countermeasures, it may be defeated using shuffling, and their use of skipping faults makes it also highly implementation dependent. Thus, the vulnerability of implementations against fault attacks and the concrete need for countermeasures is still not well understood.

In this work, we shine light on this problem and demonstrate new attack paths. Concretely, we show that the combination of fault injections with chosen-ciphertext attacks is a significant threat to implementations and can bypass several countermeasures. We state an attack on Kyber which combines ciphertext manipulation - flipping a single bit of an otherwise valid ciphertext - with a fault that "corrects" the ciphertext again during decapsulation. By then using the Fujisaki-Okamoto transform as an oracle, i.e., observing whether or not decapsulation fails, we derive inequalities involving secret data, from which we may recover the private key. Our attack is not defeated by many standard countermeasures such as shuffling in time or Boolean masking, and the fault may be introduced over a large execution-time interval at several places. In addition, we improve a known recovery technique to efficiently and practically recover the secret key from a smaller number of inequalities compared to the previous method.

We address the problem of multiparty private set intersection against a malicious adversary. First, we show that when one can assume no collusion amongst corrupted parties then there exists an extremely efficient protocol given only symmetric-key primitives. Second, we present a protocol secure against an adversary corrupting any strict subset of the parties. Our protocol is based on the recently introduced primitives: oblivious programmable PRF (OPPRF) and oblivious key-value store (OKVS).

Our protocols follow the client-server model where each party is either a client or a server. However, in contrast to previous works where the client has to engage in an expensive interactive cryptographic protocol, our clients need only send a single key to each server and a single message to a {\em pivot} party (where message size is in the order of the set size). Our experiments show that the client's load improves by up to $10 \times$ (compared to both semi-honest and malicious settings) and that factor increases with the number of parties.

We implemented our protocol and conducted an extensive experiment over both LAN and WAN and up to 32 parties with up to $2^{20}$ items each. We provide a comparison of the performance of our protocol and the state-of-the-art for both the semi-honest setting (by Chandran et al.) and the malicious setting (by Ben Efraim et al. and Garimella et al.).

The standard security notion for digital signatures is "single-challenge" (SC) EUF-CMA security, where the adversary outputs a single message-signature pair and "wins" if it is a forgery. Auerbach et al. (CRYPTO 2017) introduced memory-tightness of reductions and argued that the right security goal in this setting is actually a stronger "multi-challenge" (MC) definition, where an adversary may output many message-signature pairs and "wins" if at least one is a forgery. Currently, no construction from simple standard assumptions is known to achieve full tightness with respect to time, success probability, and memory simultaneously. Previous works showed that memory-tight signatures cannot be achieved via certain natural classes of reductions (Auerbach et al., CRYPTO 2017; Wang et al., EUROCRYPT 2018). These impossibility results may give the impression that the construction of memory-tight signatures is difficult or even impossible.

We show that this impression is false, by giving the first constructions of signature schemes with full tightness in all dimensions in the MC setting. To circumvent the known impossibility results, we first introduce the notion of canonical reductions in the SC setting. We prove a general theorem establishing that every signature scheme with a canonical reduction is already memory-tightly secure in the MC setting, provided that it is strongly unforgeable, the adversary receives only one signature per message, and assuming the existence of a tightly-secure pseudorandom function. We then achieve memory-tight many-signatures-per-message security in the MC setting by a simple additional generic transformation. This yields the first memory-tightly, strongly EUF-CMA-secure signature schemes in the MC setting. Finally, we show that standard security proofs often already can be viewed as canonical reductions. Concretely, we show this for signatures from lossy identification schemes (Abdalla et al., EUROCRYPT 2012), two variants of RSA Full-Domain Hash (Bellare and Rogaway, EUROCRYPT 1996), and two variants of BLS signatures (Boneh et al., ASIACRYPT 2001).

We investigate the quality of security reductions for non-interactive key exchange (NIKE) schemes. Unlike for many other cryptographic building blocks (like public-key encryption, signatures, or zero-knowledge proofs), all known NIKE security reductions to date are non-tight, i.e., lose a factor of at least the number of users in the system. In that sense, NIKE forms a particularly elusive target for tight security reductions.

The main technical obstacle in achieving tightly secure NIKE schemes are adaptive corruptions. Hence, in this work, we explore security notions and schemes that lie between selective security and fully adaptive security. Concretely:

- We exhibit a tradeoff between key size and reduction loss. We show that a tighter reduction can be bought by larger public and secret NIKE keys. Concretely, we present a simple NIKE scheme with a reduction loss of O(N^2 log(\nu)/\nu^2), and public and secret keys of O(\nu) group elements, where N denotes the overall number of users in the system, and \nu is a freely adjustable scheme parameter.

Our scheme achieves full adaptive security even against multiple "test queries" (i.e., adversarial challenges), but requires keys of size O(N) to achieve (almost) tight security under the matrix Diffie-Hellman assumption. Still, already this simple scheme circumvents existing lower bounds.

- We show that this tradeoff is inherent. We contrast the security of our simple scheme with a lower bound for all NIKE schemes in which shared keys can be expressed as an ``inner product in the exponent''. This result covers the original Diffie-Hellman NIKE scheme, as well as a large class of its variants, and in particular our simple scheme. Our lower bound gives a tradeoff between the ``dimension'' of any such scheme (which directly corresponds to key sizes in existing schemes), and the reduction quality. For \nu = O(N), this shows our simple scheme and reduction optimal (up to a logarithmic factor).

- We exhibit a tradeoff between security and key size for tight reductions. We show that it is possible to circumvent the inherent tradeoff above by relaxing the desired security notion. Concretely, we consider the natural notion of semi-adaptive security, where the adversary has to commit to a single test query after seeing all public keys. As a feasibility result, we bring forward the first scheme that enjoys compact public keys and tight semi-adaptive security under the conjunction of the matrix Diffie-Hellman and learning with errors assumptions.

We believe that our results shed a new light on the role of adaptivity in NIKE security, and also illustrate the special role of NIKE when it comes to tight security reductions.

The algebraic-group model (AGM), which lies between the generic group model and the standard model of computation, provides a means by which to analyze the security of cryptosystems against so-called algebraic adversaries. We formalize the AGM within the framework of universal composability, providing formal definitions for this setting and proving an appropriate composition theorem. This extends the applicability of the AGM to more-complex protocols, and lays the foundations for analyzing algebraic adversaries in a composable~fashion. Our results also clarify the meaning of composing proofs in the AGM with other proofs and they highlight a natural form of independence between idealized groups that seems inherent to the AGM and has not been made formal before---these insights also apply to the composition of game-based proofs in the AGM. We show the utility of our model by proving several important protocols universally composable for algebraic adversaries, specifically: (1) the Chou-Orlandi protocol for oblivious transfer, and (2) the SPAKE2 and CPace protocols for password-based authenticated key exchange.

Applications are invited for both entry level and senior academic posts to join our community and help us lead and develop our research and teaching in the areas of Hardware and Embedded Systems Security; Applied Cryptography; Security of AI; Network Forensics; or ICS Security within our Centre for Secure Information Technologies (www.csit.qub.ac.uk).

CSIT is an Innovation and Knowledge centre in cyber security funded by EPSRC and Innovate UK since 2009. It is host to the UK Research Institute in Secure Hardware and Embedded Systems (RISE: www.ukrise.org). It is also a partner in the UK Research Institute in Trustworthy Interconnected Cyber Physical Systems (RITICS: ritics.org) and is recognised by NCSC as an Academic Centre of Excellence (ACE) in Cyber Security Research. You will also have opportunities to work with vibrant engineering and commercial teams to translate your research into impact and help you build industry linkages.

We are seeking candidates with research experience (commensurate with career stage) in one or more of the following areas:
(1) Hardware & Embedded Systems Security:
Hardware cryptographic architectures, physical unclonable function, side channel analysis, security of microprocessor architectures, and/or hardware Trojan detection
(2) Applied Cryptography: hardware and software implementation of advanced cryptographic algorithms (e.g., post-quantum, homomorphic encryption), security protocol design, privacy-preserving cryptographic protocol design and implementation
(3) Security of AI: Adversarial learning and/or testing, mitigations against poisoning, evasion, and backdoor attacks.
(4) Network forensics and/or software defined networks: Network intrusion detection, vulnerabilities in SDNFV networks, analytics-based monitoring, and forensics capabilities
(5) Industrial control system security: Resilience in ICS, cyber-physical situation awareness in IT-OT systems, Programmable Logic Controller security

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Professor Máire O'Neill

More information: https://hrwebapp.qub.ac.uk/tlive_webrecruitment/wrd/run/ETREC107GF.open?VACANCY_ID=198185FSGi&WVID=6273090Lgx&LANG=USA

Simula UiB is currently looking for a new director to lead the company. The recruitment process is being handled by Bønes Virik. For more information and applying, see https://bonesvirik.recman.no/job.php?job_id=229981

Simula UiB AS is a research center with strong professional competence in cryptography and information theory. Through research and education of master’s and PhD candidates in the field, we ensure valuable expertise in technological protection of business and public institutions in Norway. Established in 2016, Simula UiB is owned by Simula Research Laboratory AS and the University of Bergen (UiB). We work closely with other companies in the Simula Group, Universities, and other research centers. We are currently nine permanent employees and 17 PhD fellows and Postdocs. Read more about us at www.simula-uib.com.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Anne S. Posner, Managing Partner of Bønes Virik
email: anne@bonesvirik.no
phone: +47 90691846

More information: https://bonesvirik.recman.no/job.php?job_id=229981

The School of Computing and Information Technology (SCIT) is looking to recruit two enthusiastic staff members to support teaching and research within SCIT, particularly in the cybersecurity domain, which includes flexible delivery, online degrees and micro-credentials. SCIT aims to maintain its position as a world class Research School and this position is expected to contribute towards that aim. The candidates are expected to carry significant research profile and metrics, relative to opportunity, such as high h-index and citations, and experience in attracting research funding.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Prof. Willy Susilo

More information: https://uniroles.com.au/display-job/23863/Lecturer,-Cyber-Security.html?searchId=1631859551.4407&page=1