IACR News
Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:
18 March 2022
Rome, Italy, 20 June - 23 June 2022
Event CalendarSubmission deadline: 1 April 2022
Notification: 15 April 2022
A Leading Financial Technology Firm
Job PostingClosing date for applications:
Contact: Charles Isaac
Dfns
Job PostingDfns is a cybersecurity company that builds custody* SaaS protocol for web3 apps. Think of it as a developer tool that provides secure cloud for crypto. Our mission is to bring serenity to DeFi by eliminating new blockchain risks and making crypto transactions easier, faster, more affordable, and compliant with existing regulations.
From fintechs to large banks to e-commerce sites, Dfns gives financial institutions and businesses the freedom to own and transfer crypto on a battle-designed security infrastructure. Our API is designed to offer best-in-class developer experience allowing any platform to deploy custodial wallets in a matter of days, with streamlined feature delivery and frequent security upgrades.
Founded in 2020 in Paris, Dfns is a startup incubated at Station F (awarded Future40), accelerated by Techstars and recognized DeepTech by the French Ministry of Economy. Our company is fully remote with offices in Paris, Amsterdam, New York, London, Stockholm, Sofia, and other cities.
Job Description
You will contribute to one of the most ambitious technology projects in crypto today: building a trustless custody infrastructure for the trillion-dollar digital asset industry.
You will join an amazing team of leaders (CTO, CISO, CPO) and experts (R&D Engineers, Cryptographers, Security Engineers) in a highly challenging and collaborative environment.
We are looking for a trailblazing VP of Research who can explore blockchain and ZK technology, generate new product ideas, and outline detailed R&D strategies. You will need to manage diverse teams spanning engineering and marketing, requiring both a strong technical background and excellent business skills. As an ideal candidate, you will have a keen eye for gaps in client product offerings and the innovative mindset to fill them. You’re a highly skilled cryptographer with a proven ability to strategize the full lifecycle of patent production—from conception through release.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: chris@dfns.co
More information: https://www.welcometothejungle.com/en/companies/dfns/jobs/vp-of-research_paris?q=6ea9e03888204c360e4888930ccfcdc0&o=944248&e=companies_jobs
Dfns
Job PostingDfns is a cybersecurity company that builds custody SaaS protocol for web3 apps. Think of it as a developer tool that provides secure cloud for crypto. Our mission is to bring serenity to DeFi by eliminating new blockchain risks and making crypto transactions easier, faster, more affordable, and compliant with existing regulations.
From fintechs to large banks to e-commerce sites, Dfns gives financial institutions and businesses the freedom to own and transfer crypto on a battle-designed security infrastructure. Our API is designed to offer best-in-class developer experience allowing any platform to deploy custodial wallets in a matter of days, with streamlined feature delivery and frequent security upgrades.
Founded in 2020 in Paris, Dfns is a startup incubated at Station F (awarded Future40), accelerated by Techstars and recognized DeepTech by the French Ministry of Economy. Our company is fully remote with offices in Paris, Amsterdam, New York, London, Stockholm, Sofia, and other cities.
Job Description
You will contribute to one of the most ambitious technology projects in crypto today: building a trustless custody infrastructure for the trillion-dollar digital asset industry.
You will join an amazing team of leaders (CTO, VP of Research, CISO) and experts (Software Engineers, R&D Engineers, Security Engineers) in a highly challenging and collaborative environment.
We are looking for a Senior Cryptographer to develop our crypto systems using algorithmic, asymmetric, zk proofs, thresholdized cryptography and other types of tools to encrypt sensitive data and protect it from hackers, misuse, and cybercrime.
As a Cryptographer, you will be laser-focused on finding ways to protect blockchain keys from being intercepted, decrypted, copied, altered, or deleted by unauthorized actors. You will need a deep understanding of cryptography, namely MPC and its related algorithms. You will also develop and apply various mathematical models to help find and thwart potential systems threats.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: chris@dfns.co
More information: https://www.welcometothejungle.com/en/companies/dfns/jobs/senior-cryptographer_paris?q=b03d4fc5976286120e927867a4e9817b&o=944230&e=companies_jobs
Research & Development Group, Horizen Labs; Milano, Italy
Job PostingOur Core Engineering Team is an innovative and collaborative group of researchers and software engineers who are dedicated to the design and development of world-class blockchain-based products. We are looking for a cryptographer, or applied cryptographer, to join our growing crypto team based in Milan, Italy. Currently, the team is developing a protocol suite for SNARK-based proof-composition, but its duties reach beyond that, developing privacy-enhancing solutions for our sidechain ecosystem.
Responsabilities- Design privacy-enhancing technology built on SNARK-based protocols
- Perform collaborative research and assist technical colleagues in their development work
- Participate in standards-setting
- Ph.D. in mathematics, computer science, or cryptography
- Solid foundations in zero-knowledge and cryptographic protocols
- Publications in acknowledged venues on applied or theoretical cryptography, preferably cryptographic protocols or PETs
- Strong problem-solving skills
- The ability to work in a team setting as well as autonomously
- Foundations in blockchain technology and experience in reading Rust are a plus
- A competitive salary plus pre-series A stock options
- Flexible working hours, including the possibility of remote working
- The opportunity to work with talented minds on challenging topics in this field, including the most recent advancements in zero-knowledge
- A nice and informal team setting to conduct research and development of high-quality open source solutions
If you are interested in this position, you might want to take a look at our recent publications (IACR eprints 2021/930, 2021/399, 2020/123) and our latest podcast on zeroknowledge.fm (Episode 178).
Closing date for applications:
Contact: recruiting@horizenlabs.io
More information: https://horizenlabs.io/
Technology Innovation Institute (TII) - Abu Dhabi, UAE
Job PostingTechnology Innovation Institute (TII) is a publicly funded research institute, based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. It is home to a diverse community of leading scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and researchers from across the globe, transforming problems and roadblocks into pioneering research and technology prototypes that help move society ahead.
Cryptography Research Center
In our connected digital world, secure and reliable cryptography is the foundation of digital information security and data integrity. We address the world’s most pressing cryptographic questions. Our work covers post-quantum cryptography, lightweight cryptography, cloud encryption schemes, secure protocols, quantum cryptographic technologies and cryptanalysis.
Position: Senior MPC Researcher
Skills required for the job
Qualifications
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Mehdi Messaoudi - Talent Acquisition Manager
mehdi.messaoudi@tii.ae
More information: https://www.tii.ae/cryptography
Universität der Bundeswehr München, Research Institute CODE
Job PostingClosing date for applications:
Contact: Further information is available via Prof. Harald Baier, harald.baier@unibw.de
More information: https://jobs.zeit.de/jobs/universitaetsprofessur-w3-fuer-kryptologie-universitaet-der-bundeswehr-muenchen-neubiberg-1056374
Meta Financial Technologies
Job PostingClosing date for applications:
Contact: Please contact klewi [at] fb [dot] com and arnabr [at] fb [dot] com
Aymeric Genêt, Novak Kaluđerović
ePrint ReportDamiano Abram, Ivan Damgård, Claudio Orlandi, Peter Scholl
ePrint ReportAlexander May, Carl Richard Theodor Schneider
ePrint ReportOur backdoor mechanism works by encoding the encryption of $\boldsymbol{\delta}$ into the public key. Retrieving $\boldsymbol{\delta}$ then allows to efficiently recover the (backdoored) secret key. Interestingly, McEliece can be used itself to encrypt $\boldsymbol{\delta}$, thereby protecting our backdoor mechanism with strong post-quantum security guarantees.
Our backdoor mechanism also works for the current Classic McEliece NIST standard proposal, and therefore opens the door for widespread maliciously backdoored implementations.
Fortunately, there is a simple fix to guard (Classic) McEliece against backdoors. While it is not strictly necessary to store $\boldsymbol{\delta}$ after key generation, we show that $\boldsymbol{\delta}$ allows identifying maliciously backdoored keys. Thus, our results provide strong advice to implementers to store $\boldsymbol{\delta}$ inside the secret key (as the proposal recommends), and use $\boldsymbol{\delta}$ to guard against backdoor mechanisms.
Panagiotis Chatzigiannis, Konstantinos Chalkias
ePrint ReportThijs Veugen, Bart Kamphorst, Michiel Marcus
ePrint ReportAljosha Judmayer, Nicholas Stifter, Philipp Schindler, Edgar Weippel
ePrint ReportCong Zhang, Yu Chen, Weiran Liu, Min Zhang, Dongdai Lin
ePrint ReportBy instantiating the generic constructions of mq-RPMT, we obtain two concrete PSU protocols based on SKE and PKE techniques respectively. We implement our two PSU protocols and compare them with the state-of-the-art PSU. Experiments show that our PKE-based protocol has the lowest communication of all schemes, which is $4.1-14.8\times$ lower depending on set size. The running time of our PSU scheme is $1.2-12\times$ faster than that of state-of-the-art depending on network environments.
Antonin Leroux
ePrint ReportMUSTAIN BILLAH, SK. TANZIR MEHEDI, ADNAN ANWAR, ZIAUR RAHMAN, RAFIQUL ISLAM
ePrint ReportAlexander Bienstock, Jaiden Fairoze, Sanjam Garg, Pratyay Mukherjee, Srinivasan Raghuraman
ePrint ReportIn this work, we develop a new Universally Composable (UC) definition F_DR that we show is provably achieved by the DR protocol. Our definition captures not only the security and correctness guarantees of the DR already identified in the prior state-of-the-art analyses of Cohn-Gordon et al. and Alwen et al., but also more guarantees that are absent from one or both of these works. In particular, we construct six different modified versions of the DR protocol, all of which are insecure according to our definition F_DR, but remain secure according to one (or both) of their definitions. For example, our definition is the first to capture CCA-style attacks possible immediately after a compromise — attacks that, as we show, the DR protocol provably resists, but were not captured by prior definitions.
We additionally show that multiple compromises of a party in a short time interval, which the DR should be able to withstand, as we understand from its whitepaper, nonetheless introduce a new non-trivial (albeit minor) weakness of the DR. Since the definitions in the literature (including our F_DR above) do not capture security against this more nuanced scenario, we define a new stronger definition F_TR that does.
Finally, we provide a minimalistic modification to the DR (that we call the Triple Ratchet, or TR for short) and show that the resulting protocol securely realizes the stronger functionality F_TR. Remarkably, the modification incurs no additional communication cost and virtually no additional computational cost. We also show that these techniques can be used to improve communication costs in other scenarios, e.g. practical Updatable Public Key Encryption schemes and the re-randomized TreeKEM protocol of Alwen et al. [CRYPTO 2020] for Secure Group Messaging.
Diana Ghinea, Chen-Da Liu-Zhang, Roger Wattenhofer
ePrint ReportWe consider AA protocols where a PKI is available, and show the first AA protocol that achieves simultaneously security against $t_s$ corruptions when the network is synchronous and $t_a$ corruptions when the network is asynchronous, for any $0\le t_a < n/3 \le t_s < n/2$ such that $t_a + 2 \cdot t_s < n$. We further show that our protocol is optimal by proving that achieving AA for $t_a + 2 \cdot t_s \ge n$ is impossible (even with setup). Remarkably, this is also the first AA protocol that tolerates more than $n/3$ corruptions in the synchronous network model.