IACR News
Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:
25 February 2022
QPQ
At QPQ, we are building the Internet of Economics, a new approach to a compliant and regulated financial systems infrastructure. Join a team of mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers and self-taught individuals. We give you
- A stimulating, Socratic intellectual environment. As Socratic implies, we want you to have a voice. We do not recruit brilliant people to put them in boxes, we recruit brilliant people so they can push the horizons even further
- Hybrid office approach – we have been a distributed workforce from the start. This role is centred around our European axis, so we expect you to live within +/- 2 hours of CET. We get together a complete team every quarter, so you must be willing to travel and embrace being part of a diverse team drawn from many walks of life and cultures
- Competitive salary, travel expense budget and many opportunities to participate in the company’s growth
Responsibilities:
- Perform research and engineering on cryptographic protocols
- Working with a multi-faceted team of practitioners on a set of blockchain-based privacy protocols interacting with the DeFi space and providing compliance with financial regulations
Requirements:
- Master or Ph.D. in cryptography or a closely related field
- Be able to prototype protocols/schemes/algorithms in at least one relevant programming language
- Have a thorough approach and be committed to high quality output
- Be eager to learn new topics and tools, proactive, self-driven approach and problem-solving mindset
- Good communication and collaboration skills
- Able to proactively identify which activities can benefit the project the most in the shortest period of time, communicate, and execute on their ideas without needing to be micromanaged
- Full-time availability with flexible working hours
- Nice to be familiar with blockchain, DeFi space and general understanding of full-stack system architecture
- Nice to have knowledge of zk proof systems
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Apply as soon as possible with a CV, a video, or anything that will showcase your abilities. Person in contact: Emanuele Ragnoli (eragnoli@qpq.io)
QPQ
• A stimulating, Socratic intellectual environment. As Socratic implies, we want you to have a voice. We do not recruit brilliant people to put them in boxes, we recruit brilliant people, so they can push the horizons even further
• Hybrid office approach. This role is centred around our European axis, so we expect you to live within +/- 2 hours of CET. We get together a complete team every quarter, so you must be willing to travel and embrace being part of a diverse team drawn from many walks of life and cultures
• Competitive salary, travel expense budget and many opportunities to participate in the company’s growth
Responsibilities:
- Perform research and engineering on cryptographic protocols;- Have a leading role in the cryptography team in defining and applying protocols
- Working with a multi-faceted team of practitioners on a set of blockchain-based privacy protocols interacting with the DeFi space and providing compliance with financial regulations
Requirements:
- Master or Ph.D./Multi-year working experience in cryptography or a closely related field
- Knowledge of modern cryptographic primitives
- Be able to prototype protocols/schemes/algorithms in at least one relevant programming language
- Be familiar with the blockchain and DeFi space
- General understanding of full-stack system architecture
- Have a thorough approach and be committed to high quality output. Have prior research/code already published in the space
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills
- Be eager to learn new topics and tools, proactive, self-driven approach and problem-solving mindset
- Able to proactively identify which activities can benefit the project the most in the shortest period of time, communicate, and execute on their ideas without needing to be micromanaged
- Full-time availability with flexible working hours
- Nice to have knowledge of modern, efficient zk-proofs
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Apply as soon as possible with a CV, a video, or anything that will showcase your abilities. Person in contact: Emanuele Ragnoli (eragnoli@qpq.io)
University of Birmingham, UK
The University of Birmingham’s Centre for Cyber Security and Privacy is looking for a research fellow (postdoc) to work on our EPSRC-funded project "CAP-TEE: Capability Architectures in Trusted Execution".
In this project, we use capability architectures (as e.g. developed by the CHERI project) to protect trusted execution against such state-of-the-art attacks. We address a wide range of threats from software vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows to hardware attacks like fault injection and side-channel analysis. CAP-TEE provides a strong, open-source basis for the future generation of more secure TEEs.
Applicants should have a PhD, or be close to completing a PhD, in a relevant subject (security, crypto, electrical engineering, maths, etc.). We also consider non-PhD applicants with strong industry experience. We expect experience in writing system-level or low-level code in programming languages such as C, C++, or Rust. Skills in other relevant areas, e.g. FPGA development, side-channel attacks, or binary analysis/exploitation, are desirable.
Please contact David Oswald (d.f.oswald@bham.ac.uk) for informal enquiries. You can apply online until 25 March 2022: https://bham.taleo.net/careersection/external/jobdetail.ftl?job=2200004N&tz=GMT%2B00%3A00&tzname=Europe%2FLondon
Closing date for applications:
Contact: David Oswald
d.f.oswald@bham.ac.uk
https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~oswalddf/
More information: https://bham.taleo.net/careersection/external/jobdetail.ftl?job=2200004N&tz=GMT%2B00%3A00&tzname=Europe%2FLondon
Worldline
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Bianka Kozma
More information: https://performancemanager.successfactors.eu/sf/jobreqpvt?jobId=238453&company=Worldline&st=C933D80914D042FC427C16CDE1126B7032792DE8
22 February 2022
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 13 November - 16 November 2022
Jonathan Katz, Cong Zhang, Hong-Sheng Zhou
In this work, we analyze the relationship between the AGM and Shoup’s GGM (Eurocrypt 1997) and give evidence that:
• hardness of security games in Shoup’s GGM cannot be transferred via a generic reduction in the AGM;
• the AGM and Shoup’s GGM are incomparable.
Blockchain based Contact Tracing: A Solution using Bluetooth and Sound Waves for Proximity Detection
ZiXi Hee, Iftekhar Salam
21 February 2022
Alon Shakevsky, Eyal Ronen, Avishai Wool
In this work, we expose the cryptographic design and implementation of Android's Hardware-Backed Keystore in Samsung's Galaxy S8, S9, S10, S20, and S21 flagship devices. We reversed-engineered and provide a detailed description of the cryptographic design and code structure, and we unveil severe design flaws. We present an IV reuse attack on AES-GCM that allows an attacker to extract hardware-protected key material, and a downgrade attack that makes even the latest Samsung devices vulnerable to the IV reuse attack. We demonstrate working key extraction attacks on the latest devices. We also show the implications of our attacks on two higher-level cryptographic protocols between the TrustZone and a remote server: we demonstrate a working FIDO2 WebAuthn login bypass and a compromise of Google’s Secure Key Import.
We discuss multiple flaws in the design flow of TrustZone based protocols. Although our specific attacks only apply to the $\approx$100 million devices made by Samsung, it raises the much more general requirement for open and proven standards for critical cryptographic and security designs.
Wien, Österreich, 23 August - 26 August 2022
Submission deadline: 20 April 2022
Notification: 8 June 2022
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 13 February - 16 February 2022
Submission deadline: 21 February 2022
Kansas City, USA, 17 October - 19 October 2022
Submission deadline: 3 April 2022
Notification: 19 June 2022
Aarhus, Denmark, 7 June - 10 June 2022
Submission deadline: 26 March 2022
Notification: 23 April 2022
Trondheim, Norway, 29 May - 30 May 2022
Submission deadline: 15 March 2022
Notification: 7 April 2022
Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology
For its recent H2020 project PRECINCT (Cyber-physical security management for critical infrastructures), a research engineer vacancy is immediately available in the TRUST research group at LIST. The duty of this vacancy is mainly to implement a Digital Twins solution in the context of interdependent critical systems (telecommunications and energy).
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Dr. Qiang Tang (qiang.tang@list.lu)
More information: https://app.skeeled.com/offer/62024729a7d5b0db47a87221?language=en&show_description=true
20 February 2022
Zhicong Huang, Wen-jie Lu, Cheng Hong, Jiansheng Ding
Ning Luo, Timos Antonopoulos, William Harris, Ruzica Piskac, Eran Tromer, Xiao Wang
The key insight is to prove, in ZK, the validity of *resolution proofs* of unsatisfiability. This is efficiently realized using an algebraic representation that exploits resolution proofs' structure to represent formula clauses as low-degree polynomials, combined with ZK random-access arguments. Only the proof's dimensions are revealed. We implemented our protocol and used it to prove unsatisfiability of formulas that encode combinatoric problems and program correctness conditions in standard verification benchmarks, including Linux kernel drivers and Intel cryptography modules. The results demonstrate both that our protocol has practical utility, and that its aggressive optimizations, based on non-trivial encodings, significantly improve practical performance.