IACR News
Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:
06 June 2022
Frank Y.C. Lu
ePrint ReportWe offer the first group based polynomial commitment scheme that does not rely on expensive pairing based groups or class groups with unknown order to achieve transparency while still providing logarithmic verifier and communication costs. While the asymptotic performance of our protocol is comparable to the current state of art, its concrete verifier and communication costs are about one order of magnitude more efficient than the current state of art schemes.
The asymptotic costs of our new transparent scheme is dominated by $3n \,\mathbb{G}$ exponential prover cost, 3 log $n \, \mathbb{G}$ exponential verifier cost and 3 log $n \, \mathbb{G}$ communication cost. Running with one thread and evaluating a polynomial of $n=2^{20}$ degree terms, the verifier cost of our protocol is $\approx 2.5 ms$, and the communication cost is $\approx 2 KB$, giving approximately 11X and 9X improvement over the current state of art.
Augustin Bariant and Gaëtan Leurent
ePrint Report03 June 2022
Research & Development Group, Horizen Labs
Job PostingHorizen Labs is a blockchain technology company that designs, develops, and delivers powerful, scalable, and reliable distributed ledger solutions for business.
Our 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 working on cutting edge tech, including zkSNARKS, proof systems and zkVMs, to fundamentally change the way of building decentralized and scalable Web3 applications. We are looking for a Lead Zero-Knowledge Cryptographer for our cryptographic team distributed across the globe. Amongst other projects, the team is dedicated to the design of our Layer-2 scaling solution based on STARK-proven virtual machines. You will help our team grow, conduct research and lay out SNARK-based cryptographic protocols, working on related cutting-edge technologies such as zkVMs.
RequirementsYou should be aware of state of the art proving systems such as Plonk and STARKs, and have a solid background in computational models and blockchain technologies. Additional requirements are represented by:
- 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, and PETs;
- Strong problem-solving skills;
- The ability to work in a team setting as well as autonomously
Experience in reading code (e.g. C++, Rust) though not mandatory, it is welcomed.
We offer:- Competitive salary, yearly bonus, and stock options
- Flexible working hours, fully remote if preferred
- The opportunity to work with talented minds on innovative, high-quality open source solutions.
If you want to get more knowledge about our technology, read our Whitepapers at the website: https://www.horizen.io/research/
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Raffaella Lixi raffaella@horizenlabs.io
More information: https://horizenlabs.io/careers/job/?gh_jid=4536288004
Research & Development Group, Horizen Labs
Job PostingHorizen Labs is a blockchain technology company that designs, develops, and delivers powerful, scalable, and reliable distributed ledger solutions for business.
We are looking for an engineer who will contribute in building the cryptographic infrastructure of our Web 3.0-enabled blockchain ecosystem. You will be involved in the design and implementation of our zero-knowledge Layer 2 scaling solution based on STARK-proven virtual machines. Our international team works in a stimulating and innovative environment, where people’s technical expertise and experience contribute to the development of cutting-edge blockchain technology.
Requirements- Experience in implementing zero-knowledge proving systems or related cryptographic primitives;
- Comfortable in implementing low-level operations such as finite field arithmetics, hash functions, etc.;
- Enthusiastic about algorithmic improvements and code optimization.
- Plonk, STARKs, AIR circuits,
- EVM, zk-VMs,
- C/C++/Rust programming language
- Competitive salary, yearly bonus, and stock options
- Flexible working hours, fully remote if preferred
- The opportunity to work with talented minds on innovative, high-quality open source solutions.
If you want to get more knowledge about our technology, read our Whitepapers at the website: https://www.horizen.io/research/
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Raffaella Lixi raffaella@horizenlabs.io
Research & Development Group, Horizen Labs
Job PostingHorizen Labs is a blockchain technology company that designs, develops, and delivers powerful, scalable, and reliable distributed ledger solutions for business.
Our 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). For further questions, please contact the email below.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Raffaella Lixi raffaella@horizenlabs.io
University of Wollongong, Australia
Job PostingClosing date for applications:
Contact: Prof Willy Susilo
More information: https://ejgl.fa.ap1.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/CandidateExperience/en/sites/CX_1/job/2502/?mode=location
Villanova University, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Villanova, PA USA
Job PostingVillanova University ranks #49 National Universities in the USA (US News), is located in Villanova, west suburban of Philadelphia. Famous alumni include the current First Lady of the USA!
Requirements: Preferred to be in majors of CS/CE/EE, Applied Mathematics/Cryptography.
Skillful in programming Languages such as CC++, Python, VHDL/Verilog, and so on.
Deadline: better to start in Fall 2022/Spring 2023.
This research focuses on the security aspects of post-quantum cryptography and related implementations (or AI accelerator). Advisor and senior Ph.D. student will guide you to get started and work together on forthcoming challenges. You will not be fighting alone!!!
Contact email: jiafeng.xie@villanova.edu
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Jiafeng Harvest Xie
More information: https://www.ece.villanova.edu/~jxie02/lab/
Birmingham , UK , 7 November - 9 November 2022
Event CalendarSubmission deadline: 24 June 2022
Notification: 6 August 2022
Lyon, France, 23 April - 27 April 2023
EurocryptOkinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Networked Quantum Devices Unit
Job PostingWe offer several postdoctoral positions at the networked quantum devices unit at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. Potential research topics include:
- Theory of quantum key distribution or other quantum cryptographic protocols.
- Private and quantum capacities of channels and networks.
The Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) is a dynamic new graduate university in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. The university is located on 85 hectares of protected forestland overlooking beautiful shoreline and coral reefs. The campus is striking architecturally, and the facilities are outstanding. There are no academic departments, which facilitates multidisciplinary research. Outstanding resources and equipment are provided and managed to encourage easy access and collaboration. English is the official language of the University, and the university research community is fully international, with more than 50 countries represented. OIST has rapidly gained recognition in the worldwide academic community as a model for excellence.
Benefits:
- Relocation, housing and commuting allowances
- Annual paid leave and summer holidays
- Health insurance Private School Mutual Aid
- Welfare pension insurance (kousei-nenkin)
- Worker’s accident compensation insurance (roudousha-saigai-hoshou-hoken)
Closing date for applications:
Contact: David Elkouss
More information: https://groups.oist.jp/netq/postdoc-application-form
University of Wollongong, Australia
Job PostingClosing date for applications:
Contact: For more information and/or to submit CVs, please contact Prof Willy Susilo (wsusilo@uow.edu.au, https://sites.google.com/view/willy-susilo/) and Dr Khoa Nguyen (khoa@uow.edu.au, https://sites.google.com/view/khoantt/).
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 Centre
Our work covers post-quantum cryptography, lightweight cryptography, cloud encryption schemes, secure protocols, quantum cryptographic technologies and cryptanalysis.
Position: Senior ASIC Design and Verification Engineer
Skills required for the job
Closing date for applications:
Contact:
Mehdi Messaoudi - Talent Acquisition Manager
mehdi.messaoudi@tii.ae
Max Planck Institute / Ruhr University of Bochum
Job PostingThe Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (https://www.mpi-sp.org/) and Ruhr University Bochum (https://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/en) are looking for an outstanding PhD candidate or postdoctoral researcher, as part of the CASA (https://casa.rub.de/en/) cluster of excellence. The successful candidate will be expected to conduct theoretical research at the intersection of quantum information and cryptography. Examples of possible areas include (but are not limited to):
To be eligible for a PhD position, the candidate must have:
Postdoctoral candidates will also be considered, in which case the candidate is expected to carry out independent research in an area related to the topics described above. To be eligible, the candidate should have a publication record in top conferences/journals in cryptography, quantum information, or mathematical physics.
The Max Planck Institute and the Ruhr University are co-located in Bochum (Germany) and offer a vibrant atmosphere for research that spans across many areas of computer science and mathematics. The Ph.D. program is entirely in English; knowledge of German is not required.
The position is fully funded (100%) and paid according to the E-13 pay category (E-14 for postdocs). The starting date is negotiable, but ideally in fall 2022.
To apply for the position, please send:
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Giulio Malavolta (giulio.malavolta@mpi-sp.org) and Michael Walter (michael.walter@rub.de).
02 June 2022
Tejaswi Nadahalli, Majid Khabbazian, and Roger Wattenhofer
ePrint ReportVarun Maram, Daniel Masny, Sikhar Patranabis, and Srinivasan Raghuraman
ePrint ReportWe fill this gap by presenting the first formal analysis of the IND-qCPA security of OCB. In particular, we show the first attacks breaking the IND-qCPA security of the OCB modes. Surprisingly, we are able to prove that OCB2 is IND-qCPA secure when used without associated data, while relying on the assumption that the underlying block cipher is a quantum-secure pseudorandom permutation. Additionally, we present new quantum attacks breaking the universal unforgeability of OCB. Our analysis of OCB has implications for the post-quantum security of XTS, a well-known disk encryption standard, that was considered but mostly left open by Anand et al. (PQCrypto 2016).
Andreea B. Alexandru, Erica Blum, Jonathan Katz, and Julian Loss
ePrint ReportWe further explore efficient SMR protocols run in a network that may change between synchronous and asynchronous arbitrarily often; parties can be uncorrupted (as in the proactive model), and the protocol should remain secure as long as the appropriate corruption thresholds are always maintained. We show that proactively secure SMR using threshold cryptography is impossible without some form of synchronization between the parties. Motivated by this negative result, we consider a model where the adversary is limited in the total number of parties it can corrupt over the duration of the protocol and show, in this setting, that our SMR protocols remain secure under arbitrarily changing network conditions.
Pedro Branco, Nico Döttling, and Jesko Dujmovic
ePrint ReportDario Catalano, Dario Fiore, Rosario Gennaro, and Emanuele Giunta
ePrint ReportIn this paper, we shed light on this state of affairs by showing that a large class of concise algebraic vector commitments in pairing-free, prime order groups are impossible to realize.
Our results also preclude any cryptographic primitive that implies the algebraic vector commitments we rule out, as special cases. This means that we also show the impossibility, for instance, of succinct polynomial commitments and functional commitments (for all classes of functions including linear forms) in pairing-free groups of prime order.
Marek Bielik, Martin Jureček, Olha Jurečková, and Róbert Lórencz
ePrint ReportNils Fleischhacker, Mark Simkin, and Zhenfei Zhang
ePrint ReportWe present Squirrel, a concretely efficient lattice-based multi-signature scheme in the synchronized setting that works for a bounded number of $2^{\tau}$ time steps and allows for aggregating up to $\rho$ signatures at each step, where both $\tau$ and $\rho$ are public parameters upon which the efficiency of our scheme depends. Squirrel allows for non-interactive aggregation of independent signatures and is proven secure in the random oracle model in the presence of rogue-key attacks assuming the hardness of the short integer solution problem in a polynomial ring.
We provide a careful analysis of all parameters and show that Squirrel can be instantiated with good concrete efficiency. For $\tau = 24$ and $\rho = 4096$, a signer could sign a new message every 10 seconds for 5 years non-stop. Assuming the signer has a cache of 112 MB, signing takes 68 ms and verification of an aggregated signature takes 36 ms. The size of the public key is 1 KB, the size of an individual signature is 52 KB, and the size of an aggregated signature is 771 KB.