International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The Physical Analysis and Cryptographic Engineering (PACE), Temasek Laboratories (TL) @ Nanyang Technological University, Singapore is seeking motivated researchers, in the area of hardware security.

Candidates should ideally have already completed, or be close to completing a Master’s (with relevant experience) or PhD degree in mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering, or related disciplines, with track record in R&D (publications in international journals and conferences).

You will be joining a dynamic group performing research on embedded security. The research focus of the current roles are:

1. Hardware forensics with focus on vulnerability assessment in commercial and industrial devices.

2. Physical attack and countermeasures for novel cryptographic primitives

3. Micro-architectural attacks

This position is available from May 2022. TL offers competitive salary package plus other benefits.

Review of applications will start immediately until position is filled.

Interested candidates should send their detailed CVs, cover letter and references.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Shivam Bhasin, Principal Investigator: sbhasin (at) ntu.edu.sg

The job holder's mission will be to:

• Develop effective (security, latency, silicon area/code size costs), countermeasures against side-channel and fault attacks, by working in conjunction with SW and HW designers
• Contribute to the definition of effective post-quantum public key cryptographic implementations
• Deploy security expertise and help ST product divisions shape the right security solutions for their products (ICs).
• Stay on top of security needs and state-of-the-art evolution, anticipating/identifying solutions and partners, developing or making available the security competences and IPs that will be needed by the Company in a 3-5 years time frame.

The candidate should have:

• An extensive background in mathematics and public key cryptography
• Knowledge of state-of-the-art side-channel and fault attacks and related countermeasures
• Teamwork, networking, customer-orientation & communication skills
• Motivation for bridging research outcomes and product design
• Experience in embedded SW design or HW design is a plus

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Matteo BOCCHI (matteo.bocchi@st.com), Ruggero SUSELLA (ruggero.susella@st.com)

More information: https://stcareers.talent-soft.com/job/job-security-engineer-m-f_18168.aspx

We provide a full-fledged security analysis of the Signal end-to-end messaging protocol within the UC framework. In particular:

(1) We formulate an ideal functionality that captures end-to-end secure messaging, in a setting with PKI and an untrusted server, against an adversary that has full control over the network and can adaptively and momentarily compromise parties at any time and obtain their entire internal states. In particular our analysis captures the forward and backwards secrecy properties of Signal and the conditions under which they break. (2) We model the various components of Signal (PKI and long-term keys, backbone "asymmetric ratchet", epoch-level symmetric ratchets, authenticated encryption) as individual ideal functionalities that are analysed separately and then composed using the UC and Global-State UC theorems. (3) We use the Random Oracle Model to model non-committing encryption for arbitrary-length messages, but the rest of the analysis is in the plain model based on standard primitives. In particular, we show how to realize Signal's key derivation functions in the standard model, from generic components, and under minimalistic cryptographic assumptions.

Our analysis improves on previous ones in the guarantees it provides, in its relaxed security assumptions, and in its modularity. We also uncover some weaknesses of Signal that were not previously discussed.

Our modeling differs from previous UC models of secure communication in that the protocol is modeled as a set of local algorithms, keeping the communication network completely out of scope. We also make extensive, layered use of global-state composition within the plain UC framework. These innovations may be of separate interest.

Double-block Hash-then-Sum (DbHtS) MACs is a class of MACs achieve beyond-birthday-bound (BBB) security, including SUM-ECBC, PMAC_Plus, 3kf9 and LightMAC_Plus etc. Recently, Shen et al. (Crypto 2021) proposed a security framework for two-key DbHtS MACs in the multi-user setting, stating that when the underlying blockcipher is ideal and the universal hash function is almost regular and universal, the two-key DbHtS MACs achieve 2n/3-bit security. Unfortunately, the regular and universal properties can not guarantee the BBB security of two-key DbHtS MACs. We propose three counter-examples which are proved to be 2n/3-bit secure in the multi-user setting by the framework, but can be broken with probability $1$ using only O(2^{n/2}) queries even in the single-user setting. We also point out the miscalculation in their proof leading to such a flaw.

In a multiparty signing protocol, also known as a threshold signature scheme, the private signing key is shared amongst a set of parties and only a quorum of those parties can generate a signature. Research on multiparty signing has been growing in popularity recently due to its application to cryptocurrencies. Most work has focused on reducing the number of rounds to two, and as a result: (a) are not fully simulatable in the sense of MPC real/ideal security definitions, and/or (b) are not secure under concurrent composition, and/or (c) require proofs of security in the generic or algebraic group models. In this paper, we describe a simple three-round multiparty protocol for Schnorr signatures and prove its security. The protocol is fully simulatable, secure under concurrent composition, and proven secure in the standard model or random-oracle model (depending on the instantiations of the commitment and zero-knowledge primitives). The protocol realizes an ideal Schnorr signing functionality with perfect security in the ideal commitment and zero-knowledge hybrid model (and thus the only assumptions needed are for realizing these functionalities). We also show how to achieve proactive security and identifiable abort.

In our presentation, we do not assume that all parties begin with the message to be signed, the identities of the participating parties and a unique common session identifier, since this is often not the case in practice. Rather, the parties achieve consensus on these parameters as the protocol progresses.

We present a novel cryptographic primitive, blind accumulator, aimed at constructing e-voting systems. Blind accumulators collect private keys of eligible voters in a decentralized manner not getting information about the keys. Once the accumulation is complete, a voter processes the resulting accumulator deriving a public key that refers to the private key previously added by this voter. Public keys are derived deterministically and can therefore stand as fixed voter pseudonyms. The voter can prove that the derived key refers to some accumulated private key without revealing neither that key nor the voter itself. The voter uses the accumulated private key to sign a ballot. The corresponding public key is used to verify the signature. Since the public key is fixed, it is easy to achieve verifiability, to protect against multiple submissions of ballots by the same voter or, conversely, to allow multiple submissions but count only the last one. We suggest a syntax of blind accumulators and security requirements for them. We embed blind accumulators in the Pseudonymous Key Generation (PKG) protocol which details the use of accumulators in practical settings close to e-voting. We propose an implementation of the blind accumulator scheme whose main computations resemble the Diffie-Hellman protocol. We justify the security of the proposed implementation.

We give a novel procedure for approximating general single-qubit unitaries from a finite universal gate set by reducing the problem to a novel magnitude approximation problem, achieving an immediate improvement in sequence length by a factor of 7/9. Extending the works arXiv:1612.01011 and arXiv:1612.02689, we show that taking probabilistic mixtures of channels to solve fallback (arXiv:1409.3552) and magnitude approximation problems saves factor of two in approximation costs. In particular, over the Clifford+$\sqrt{T}$ gate set we achieve an average non-Clifford gate count of 0.23log2(1/$\varepsilon$)+2.13 and T-count 0.56log2(1/$\varepsilon$)+5.3 with mixed fallback approximations for diamond norm accuracy $\varepsilon$. This paper provides a holistic overview of gate approximation, in addition to these new insights. We give an end-to-end procedure for gate approximation for general gate sets related to some quaternion algebras, providing pedagogical examples using common fault-tolerant gate sets (V, Clifford+T and Clifford+$\sqrt{T}$). We also provide detailed numerical results for Clifford+T and Clifford+$\sqrt{T}$ gate sets. In an effort to keep the paper self-contained, we include an overview of the relevant algorithms for integer point enumeration and relative norm equation solving. We provide a number of further applications of the magnitude approximation problems, as well as improved algorithms for exact synthesis, in the Appendices.

In this paper, we present a high-performance architecture for elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) over Curve448, which to the best of our knowledge, is the fastest implementation of ECC point multiplication over Curve448 to date. Firstly, we introduce a novel variant of the Karatsuba formula for asymmetric digit multiplier, suitable for typical DSP primitive with asymmetric input. It reduces the number of required DSPs compared to previous work and preserves the performance via full parallelization and pipelining. We then construct a 244-bit pipelined multiplier and interleaved fast reduction algorithm, yielding a total of 12 stages of pipelined modular multiplication with four stages of input delay. Additionally, we present an efficient Montgomery ladder scheduling with no additional register is required. The implementation on the Xilinx 7-series FPGA: Virtex-7, Kintex-7, Artix-7, and Zynq 7020 yields execution times of 0.12, 0.13, 0.24, and 0.24 ms, respectively. It increases the throughput by 242% compared to the best previous work on Zynq 7020 and by 858% compared to the best previous work on Virtex-7. Furthermore, the proposed architecture optimizes nearly 63% efficiency improvement in terms of Area×Time tradeoff. Lastly, we extend our architecture with well-known side-channel protections such as scalar blinding, base-point randomization, and continuous randomization.

All existing methods of building non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) arguments for $\mathsf{NP}$ from the Learning With Errors (LWE) assumption have relied on instantiating the Fiat-Shamir paradigm on a parallel repetition of an underlying honest-verifier zero knowledge (HVZK) $\Sigma$ protocol, via an appropriately built correlation-intractable (CI) hash function from LWE. This technique has inherent efficiency losses that arise from parallel repetition.

In this work, we build the first NIZK argument for $\mathsf{NP}$ from the LWE assumption that does not rely on parallel repetition. Instead, we show how to make use of the more efficient ``MPC in the Head'' technique for building an underlying honest-verifier protocol upon which to apply the Fiat-Shamir paradigm. The key to making this possible is a new construction of CI hash functions from LWE, using efficient algorithms for polynomial reconstruction as the main technical tool.

We stress that our work provides a new and more efficient ``base construction'' for building LWE-based NIZK arguments for $\mathsf{NP}$. Our protocol can be the building block around which other efficiency-focused bootstrapping techniques can be applied, such as the bootstrapping technique of Gentry et al. (Journal of Cryptology 2015).

This paper considers a problem of identifying matching attacks against Romulus-M, one of the ten finalists of NIST Lightweight Cryptography standardization project. Romulus-M is provably secure, i.e., there is a theorem statement showing the upper bound on the success probability of attacking the scheme as a function of adversaries' resources. If there exists an attack that matches the provable security bound, then this implies that the attack is optimal, and that the bound is tight in the sense that it cannot be improved. We show that the security bounds of Romulus-M are tight for a large class of parameters by presenting concrete matching attacks.

We introduce the Spiral family of single-server private information retrieval (PIR) protocols. Spiral relies on a composition of two lattice-based homomorphic encryption schemes: the Regev encryption scheme and the Gentry-Sahai-Waters encryption scheme. We introduce new ciphertext translation techniques to convert between these two schemes and in doing so, enable new trade-offs in communication and computation. Across a broad range of database configurations, the basic version of Spiral simultaneously achieves at least a 4.5x reduction in query size, 1.5x reduction in response size, and 2x increase in server throughput compared to previous systems. A variant of our scheme, SpiralStreamPack, is optimized for the streaming setting and achieves a server throughput of 1.9 GB/s for databases with over a million records (compared to 200 MB/s for previous protocols) and a rate of 0.81 (compared to 0.24 for previous protocols). For streaming large records (e.g., a private video stream), we estimate the monetary cost of SpiralStreamPack to be only 1.9x greater than that of the no-privacy baseline where the client directly downloads the desired record.

We propose a novel approach that generalizes interleaved modular multiplication algorithms to the computation of sums of products over large prime fields. This operation has widespread use and is at the core of many cryptographic applications. The method reformulates the widely used lazy reduction technique, crucially avoiding the need for storage and computation of ``double-precision'' operations. Moreover, it can be easily adapted to the different methods that exist to compute modular multiplication, producing algorithms that are significantly more efficient and memory-friendly. We showcase the performance of the proposed approach in the computation of multiplication over an extension field GF(p^k), and demonstrate its impact in two popular cryptographic settings: bilinear pairings and supersingular isogeny-based protocols. For the former, we obtain a 1.37x speedup in the computation of a full optimal ate pairing over the popular BLS12-381 curve on an x64 Intel processor; for the latter, we show a speedup of up to 1.30x in the computation of the SIKE protocol on the same Intel platform.

New symmetric primitives are being designed to address a novel set of design criteria. Instead of being executed on regular processors or smartcards, they are instead intended to be run in abstract settings such as multi-party computations or zero-knowledge proof systems. This implies in particular that these new primitives are described using operations over large finite fields. As the number of such primitives grows, it is important to better understand the properties of their underlying operations. In this paper, we investigate the algebraic degree of one of the first such block ciphers, namely MiMC. It is composed of many iterations of a simple round function, which consists of an addition and of a low-degree power permutation applied to the full state, usually $x \mapsto x^{3}$. We show in particular that, while the univariate degree increases predictably with the number of rounds, the algebraic degree (a.k.a multivariate degree) has a much more complex behaviour, and simply stays constant during some rounds. Such plateaus slightly slow down the growth of the algebraic degree. We present a full investigation of this behaviour. First, we prove some lower and upper bounds for the algebraic degree of an arbitrary number of iterations of MiMC and of its inverse. Then, we combine theoretical arguments with simulations to prove that the upper bound is tight for up to 16265 rounds. Using these results, we slightly improve the higher-order differential attack presented at Asiacrypt 2020 to cover one or two more rounds. More importantly, our results provide some precise guarantees on the algebraic degree of this cipher, and then on the minimal complexity for a higher-order differential attack.

In known security reductions for the Fujisaki-Okamoto transformation, decryption failures are handled via a reduction solving the rather unnatural task of finding failing plaintexts \emph{given the private key}, resulting in a Grover search bound. Moreover, they require an implicit rejection mechanism for invalid ciphertexts to achieve a reasonable security bound in the QROM. We present a reduction that has neither of these deficiencies: We introduce two security games related to finding decryption failures, one capturing the \emph{computationally hard} task of \emph{using the public key} to find a decryption failure, and one capturing the \emph{statistically hard} task of searching the random oracle for \emph{key-independent} failures like, e.g., large randomness. As a result, our security bounds in the QROM are tighter than previous ones with respect to the generic random oracle search attacks: The attacker can only partially compute the search predicate, namely for said key-independent failures. In addition, our entire reduction works for the explicit-reject variant of the transformation and improves significantly over all of its known reductions. Besides being the more natural variant of the transformation, security of the explicit reject mechanism is also relevant for side channel attack resilience of the implicit-rejection variant. Along the way, we prove several technical results characterizing preimage extraction and certain search tasks in the QROM that might be of independent interest.

The cryptography group of ENS Lyon is seeking for post-doc candidates interested in lattice cryptography. Potential research topics non-exhaustively include:

lattice cryptographic constructions (from theory to practice);

quantum aspects of lattice cryptography (security proofs, cryptanalysis);

lattice algorithms and cryptanalysis;

algebraic number theory and lattices.

We are looking for candidates with a strong record related to any of the above topics. Starting date and duration are flexible. To apply, please send your CV, a motivation letter and names of at least two persons who can provide reference letters.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: damien.stehle@ens-lyon.fr, alain.passelegue@ens-lyon.fr, benoit.libert@ens-lyon.fr

More information: https://www.ens-lyon.fr/LIP/AriC/crypto

Event date: 6 January to 8 January 2023
Submission deadline: 15 July 2022
Notification: 15 September 2022

Event date: 26 September to 27 September 2022
Submission deadline: 27 May 2022
Notification: 29 July 2022

The Applied Cryptography Group at Technical University of Darmstadt offers a fully funded position as PhD student in Cryptography. The positions is to be filled as soon as possible for 3 years with the possibility of extension. You will conduct research and publish/present the results at top venues for research in cryptography and IT Security.

Topics of particular interest include (but are not limited to):

• Leakage/tamper resilient cryptography
• Cryptography for blockchains and cryptocurrencies
• Multiparty computation & threshold cryptography
• Decentralized finance

Your profile:

• Completed Master's degree (or equivalent) at a top university with excellent grades in computer science, mathematics or a similar area.
• Strong mathematical and/or algorithmic/theoretical CS background
• Good knowledge of cryptography. Knowledge in concepts of provable security is a plus.
• Fluent written and verbal communication skills in English

TU Darmstadt is a top research university for IT Security, Cryptography and Computer Science in Europe. We offer excellent working environment in the heart of the Frankfurt Metropolitan Area, which is internationally well-known for a high quality of life. Review of applications starts immediately until the position is filled.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Sebastian Faust (office.cac@cysec.de)

More information: https://www.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/cac/cac/index.en.jsp

Event date: 8 December to 11 December 2022
Submission deadline: 30 June 2022
Notification: 1 August 2022

We are proud to announce the winners of the 2022 IACR Test-of-Time Award. This award honors papers published at the 3 IACR flagship conferences 15 years ago which have had a lasting impact on the field.

The Test-of-Time award for Asiacrypt 2007 is awarded to: Faster Addition and Doubling on Elliptic Curves, by Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange, for introducing efficient elliptic curve addition formulae in the context of Edwards forms of elliptic curves.

The Test-of-Time award for Crypto 2007 is awarded to: Deterministic and Efficiently Searchable Encryption, by Mihir Bellare, Alexandra Boldyreva and Adam O'Neill, for placing searchable encryption on a rigorous footing, leading to a huge interest in this field in applications.

The Test-of-Time award for Eurocrypt 2007 is awarded to: An Efficient Protocol for Secure Two-Party Computation in the Presence of Malicious Adversaries, by Yehuda Lindell and Benny Pinkas, for providing the first implementable protocol for actively secure variants of Yao's protocol, and thus paving the way to more practical constructions.

For more information, see https://www.iacr.org/testoftime.

Congratulations to all winners!