International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The UCLouvain Crypto Group is recruiting Ph.D. students willing to undertake a thesis in cryptography. The Ph.D. thesis will take place in the dynamic research environment of the group at UCLouvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium), in collaboration with other Ph.D. students, post-doctoral researchers and professors working on various aspects of cryptography.

The candidates should hold a master or engineering degree in mathematics, computer science or electronics, with strong interest in cryptography and security. A preliminary background in cryptography is useful, but not mandatory. The researcher will be hired for a one-year contract that can be renewed up to three times.

Several positions are open, in various subfields of cryptography, including verifiable computation, privacy-preserving technologies and leakage resilient cryptography.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Candidates are invited to send a resume and motivation letter to Pr. Olivier Pereira, Pr. Francois-Xavier Standaert, Pr. Thomas Peters and Dr. Francois Koeune (email format: first name dot last name at uclouvain.be).

Applications are invited for a research intern position at the IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid, Spain.

Selected candidates will work under the supervision of Marco Guarnieri (https://mguarnieri.github.io).

The internship will focus on security at the hardware-software interface. The specific topic of the research will be determined based on the common interests of the candidate and the supervisor.

Who should apply?

Ideal candidates should be final year master students in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or Mathematics with an interest in the aforementioned research topic. Experience in the following areas is a plus:(a) Computer Security, (b) Testing and Fuzzing, (c) Computer architectures, (d) Program analysis and verification, (e) Formal methods and logics. Solid programming skills will be highly valued. The position requires good teamwork and communication skills, including excellent spoken and written English.

Dates

The internship duration is intended to be for 4-6 months (with some flexibility). The ideal starting period is from September 2022. Deadline for applications is July 15th, 2022. Review of applications will begin immediately, and continue until the positions are filled.

How to apply?

Applicants interested in the position should submit their application at https://careers.software.imdea.org/ selecting option 7 - Internship and reference code 2022-06-intern-uarchsec.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Marco Guarnieri (marco dot guarnieri at imdea dot org)

More information: https://software.imdea.org/open_positions/2022-06-intern-uarchsec.html

Applications are invited for one PhD student position in at the IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid, Spain.

Selected candidates will work under the supervision of Marco Guarnieri (https://mguarnieri.github.io).

The PhD position is in system security with a focus on security at the hardware-software interface. The specific topic of the research will be determined based on the common interests of the candidate and the supervisor.

Who should apply?

Ideal candidates have earned (or are in their last year of) a Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or Mathematics, with experience in at least one of the following areas: (a) Computer Security, (b) Testing and Fuzzing, (c) Computer architectures, (d) Program analysis and verification, (e) Formal methods and logics.

Solid programming skills will be highly valued. The position requires good teamwork and communication skills, including excellent spoken and written English.

Dates

The duration of the position is intended to be for the duration of the doctoral studies. The ideal starting period is from September 2022. Deadline for applications is July 15th, 2022. Review of applications will begin immediately, and continue until the positions are filled.

How to apply?

Applicants interested in the position should submit their application at https://careers.software.imdea.org/ selecting option 5 - PhD Student and reference code 2022-06-phd-uarchsec.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Marco Guarnieri (marco dot guarnieri at imdea dot org)

Ph.D. student

Université de Lyon, Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Etienne, France The Embedded System Security Group at University Jean Monnet (Saint-Etienne, France) is looking for motivated PhD students. We are looking for candidates to work on protection of implementation against physical attacks. This project aims to develop side-channel attacks and fault attacks against lightweight block-cipher and propose tailored countermeasures.

Your tasks:

Research in the field of physical attacks

Possible teaching to the extent of 4 hours a week

Your profile:

Master's degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, electronics, or a related area by the time of appointment.

Interest in the areas of cryptography and IT security.

Fluency in English (written and spoken).

Knowledge of French is not mandatory.

If you are interested, please send an email including your detailed CV to vincent.grosso@univ-st-etienne.fr. Applications will be reviewed continuously until the position is filled.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Vincent Grosso: vincent.grosso@univ-st-etienne.fr

Do you have a PhD and are you interested in researching the law and regulation of cybersecurity, and in combining this with insights from ethics and economics? If you are excited about doing this kind of research in an interdisciplinary environment, with a team of friendly and enthusiastic colleagues, and with partners from the financial and governmental sectors, then you may want to join us. The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation and the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam are looking for an ambitious postdoctoral candidate. Your research is part of the NWO-funded research project Quantum Impact on Societal Security.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: s.deharo@uva.nl

More information: https://www.illc.uva.nl/NewsandEvents/News/Positions/newsitem/13758/Postdoctoral-Researcher-in-the-Regulation-of-Quantum-Safe-Technology

The Security Group at University College Cork (UCC) is seeking a PhD student to work on the project “Adaptive Privacy-preservation in the Internet of Things”.

By interconnecting everyday devices and objects that were previously offline, the Internet of Things (IoT) enables data to flow from and to them, making them “smart”. However, remote connectivity also introduces significant risks for the security of the devices, and the privacy of the data being exchanged. The protection of this sensitive information requires the adoption of complex security and privacy mechanisms, including advanced encryption and anonymization techniques, such as homomorphic encryption and differential privacy. These mechanisms, however, often impose a significant overhead in terms of computational costs on constrained IoT devices. The goal of the project is to develop a framework for adaptive privacy preservation in IoT devices, providing the tools to select and calibrate privacy-enhancing technologies to suit the constraints of IoT platforms and devices, while maximizing privacy protection.

The student will join the thriving Security Group at UCC, where several PhDs and PostDocs carry out related research. The project is a collaboration between UCC (host organization) and MTU, and part of CONNECT - Centre for Future Networks & Communications, a major Science Foundation Ireland research initiative. The PhD student will work under the supervision of the Principal Investigator, Dr. Paolo Palmieri, and co-Investigator Dr. Hazel Murray (MTU).

Candidates should have a background/strong interest in security and privacy, and a good grasp of mathematics. Previous experience in cryptography is an asset, but is not required. Applicants should hold a good BSc or MSc degree in computer science, computer engineering, mathematics, or related subject.

The position is fully funded, including an annual stipend of €18,500 for up to four years and a contribution towards tuition fees. As part of the project, a travel budget is available to present at international conferences and to collaborate with other research groups.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Informal inquires can be made to Dr. Paolo Palmieri: p.palmieri@cs.ucc.ie

Applications should be submitted on-line at the link above (https://ucc.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9KOs25IaXJJcVb8).

Open until filled, but applications received by July 10 will be prioritized.

More information: https://ucc.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9KOs25IaXJJcVb8

Technology 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

Position: Cryptanalyst - Constraint Solving

Tweak your favorite constraint solving tools to perform cryptanalysis tasks

Study how to leverage machine learning techniques in the context of constraint solvers

Analyze, evaluate and target any weaknesses security systems which range from single crypto-primitives to entire protocols, from classical ciphers to the newest lightweight or post-quantum schemes

Develop mathematical and statistical models to analyze and solve security data problems

Collaborate with skillful software, hardware, and telecommunication engineers

Work with latest software and test your code on state-of-the-art High-Performance Devices

Conduct research in theoretical and practical cryptanalysis

Attend personalized in-house trainings with top cryptographers and international conferences and workshops

Skills required for the job

PhD degree in Cryptography, Applied Cryptography, Information Theory and Mathematics, Computer Science or any relevant Engineering degree

Extensive experience in constraint programming (SAT, SMT, Linear Programming, Constraint Programming)

Experience in theoretical and practical cryptanalysis

Valuable publications in the field of cryptanalysis and/or constraint programming (SAT, SMT, Linear Programming, Constraint Programming)

Extensive experience developing in various programming languages, and use of high-performance devices (CPU, GPU, TPU

Closing date for applications:

Contact:

Mehdi Messaoudi - Talent Acquisition Manager
Email: mehdi.messaoudi@tii.ae

Technology 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

The position is in the asymmetric cryptanalysis team. The team currently consists of five senior researchers (post docs) and one PhD student. We cover a broad range of expertise in post-quantum cryptanalysis with experts on multivariate-, lattice-, and code-based systems. We are currently looking to support the team particularly on the coding side by a Code-based Cryptanalysis Expert.

Conduct research in the field of asymmetric cryptanalysis, especially regarding post quantum secure systems with strong focus on code-based systems

Contribute to the NIST standardization process

Publish in top tier conferences and journals

Participate in practical cryptanalysis projects and public cryptographic challenges

Develop mathematical and statistical models to analyze and solve security data problems

Collaborate with a skillful team of software, hardware, and telecommunication engineers

Work with latest software and test your code on state-of-the-art High-Performance Devices

Attend personalized in-house trainings with top cryptographers and international conferences and workshops

Skills required for the job

PhD degree in Cryptography, Applied Cryptography, Information Theory and Mathematics, Computer Science or any relevant Engineering degree

Strong background in coding theory and/or code-based cryptography

Extensive experience in theoretical and/or practical cryptanalysis

Valuable publications in the field of cryptanalysis

Extensive experience in performing side-channel attacks

Extensive experience developing in various programming languages (preferably C / C++, CUDA, python)

A passion for solving complex puzzles

Closing date for applications:

Contact:
Mehdi Messaoudi - Talent Acquisition Manager
Email: mehdi.messaoudi@tii.ae

The School of Business Informatics and Mathematics at the university of Mannheim has a job opening for an Assistant Professor (W1) for Responsible AI for an initial period of three years. After a positive evaluation, an extension for another three years is possible.

AI is increasingly interacting with society. This gives rise to numerous ethical issues, which should be addressed both in research and teaching by this junior professorship. The successful candidate is expected to develop the research field of Responsible AI within computer science and to advance it in exchange with the existing chairs of the institute. We are looking for candidates who are particularly qualified in at least one of the following areas:

• Trustworthy and explainable AI
• Privacy and AI
• AI and Fairness
• Human-AI Interaction
• AI regulation and certification
• Social implications of AI use

Please send your application with the usual documents (curriculum vitae, list of publications, information on previous teaching and research activities, course evaluations, your three most important publications as well as copies of your certificates and references) with the keyword "Juniorprofessur Responsible AI " in paper form or as pdf files by e-mail (bewerbung.wim@uni-mannheim.de) by 15.07.2022

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Universität Mannheim
Dean of the School of Business Informatics and Mathematics at the University of Mannheim
Dr. Bernd Lübcke
B6,26 - 68131 Mannheim
E-Mail: bewerbung.wim@uni-mannheim.de

More information: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nn4ncxKEitXtqGlTi5wVCaf17C_pLOn_/view?usp=sharing

Full-time PhD or postdoctoral researcher in the area of provable security or distributed consensus algorithms. CISPA offers a diverse, world-class research environment with a faculty of more than 30 top scientists in the field of security and machine learning. Requirements: - Background in math or theoretical computer science (MSc or equivalent) - Fluency in English - You enjoy solving puzzles and like to work in a team If you are interested, please feel free to reach out to me directly or apply at: https://jobs.cispa.saarland/jobs/detail/phd-students-1 (you should indicate in your application that you would like to work with me). Female applicants are strongly encouraged to apply.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Julian Loss

More information: https://www.julianloss.com

MDPPML research group at University of Tübingen is looking for motivated PhD students in the area of cryptography, data privacy and machine learning.

Research Topics: Development and analysis of provably secure solutions for real-world problems. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): privacy-enhancing technologies, privacy-preserving machine learning, efficient operations on encrypted data, processing of encrypted data in outsourced and untrusted environments, and TEE security and development.

Requirements: Master’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related area by the time of appointment. Knowledge or interest in the areas of cryptography and machine learning.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Mete Akgün

The CRAN, with LORIA as a scientific partner, offers a one-year PostDoctoral position to work in Nancy, France, under the supervision of Gilles Millerioux (CRAN) and Marine Minier (LORIA). The selected candidate will work on topics related to the security of stream ciphers. A special emphasis of self-synchronizing stream ciphers would be welcome. The expected skills are general background on symmetric cryptography and security analysis. An hardware implementation would be considered with the help of an engineer whenever necessary. The research will be conducted in the context of the Lorraine Universite d'Excellence Digitrust project (https://www.univ-lorraine.fr/lue/les-projets-impact/digitrust/). Research work can be done in either English or French.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: To apply for the position or get further information, you must write to gilles.millerioux@univ-lorraine.fr and marine.minier@loria.fr with copies of your CV and motivation letter. Deadline for application: As Soon As Possible Start of contract: September 1st, 2022 (negotiable)

More information: https://www.univ-lorraine.fr/lue/les-projets-impact/digitrust/

We construct a classically verifiable succinct interactive argument for quantum computation (BQP) with communication complexity and verifier runtime that are poly-logarithmic in the runtime of the BQP computation (and polynomial in the security parameter). Our protocol is secure assuming the post-quantum security of indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) and Learning with Errors (LWE). This is the first succinct argument for quantum computation in the plain model; prior work (Chia-Chung-Yamakawa, TCC '20) requires both a long common reference string and non-black-box use of a hash function modeled as a random oracle.

At a technical level, we revisit the framework for constructing classically verifiable quantum computation (Mahadev, FOCS '18). We give a self-contained, modular proof of security for Mahadev's protocol, which we believe is of independent interest. Our proof readily generalizes to a setting in which the verifier's first message (which consists of many public keys) is compressed. Next, we formalize this notion of compressed public keys; we view the object as a generalization of constrained/programmable PRFs and instantiate it based on indistinguishability obfuscation.

Finally, we compile the above protocol into a fully succinct argument using a (sufficiently composable) succinct argument of knowledge for NP. Using our framework, we achieve several additional results, including

- Succinct arguments for QMA (given multiple copies of the witness), - Succinct non-interactive arguments for BQP (or QMA) in the quantum random oracle model, and - Succinct batch arguments for BQP (or QMA) assuming post-quantum LWE (without iO).

Mix-nets are protocols that allow a set of senders to send messages anonymously. Faonio et al. (ASIACRYPT’19) showed how to instantiate mix-net protocols based on Public-Verifiable Re-randomizable Replayable CCA-secure (Rand-RCCA) PKE schemes. The bottleneck of their approach is that public-verifiable Rand-RCCA PKEs are less efficient than typical CPA-secure re-randomizable PKEs. In this paper, we revisit their mix-net protocol, showing how to get rid of the cumbersome public-verifiability property, and we give a more efficient instantiation for the mix-net protocol based on a (non publicly-verifiable) Rand-RCCA scheme. Additionally, we give a more careful security analysis of their mix-net protocol.

Public key encryption schemes are increasingly being studied concretely, with an emphasis on tight bounds even in a multi-user setting. Here, two types of formalization have emerged, one with a single challenge bit and one with multiple challenge bits. Another modelling choice is whether to allow key corruptions or not. How tightly the various notions relate to each other has hitherto not been studied in detail. We show that in the absence of corruptions, single-bit left-or-right indistinguishability is the preferred notion, as it tightly implies the other (corruption-less) notions. However, in the presence of corruptions, this implication no longer holds; we suggest the use of a more general notion that tightly implies both existing options. Furthermore, for completeness we study how the relationship between left-or-right versus real-or-random evolves in the multi-user PKE setting.

Access Control Encryption (ACE) allows to control information flow between parties by enforcing a policy that specifies which user can send messages to whom. The core of the scheme is a sanitizer, i.e., an entity that ''sanitizes'' all messages by essentially re-encrypting the ciphertexts under its key. In this work we investigate the natural question of whether it is still possible to achieve some meaningful security properties in scenarios when such a sanitization step is not possible.

We answer positively by showing that it is possible to limit corrupted users to communicate only through insecure subliminal channels, under the necessary assumption that parties do not have pre-shared randomness. Moreover, we show that the bandwidth of such channels can be limited to be O(log(n)) by adding public ciphertext verifiability to the scheme under computational assumptions. In particular, we rely on a new security definition for obfuscation, Game Specific Obfuscation (GSO), which is a weaker definition than VBB, as it only requires the obfuscator to obfuscate programs in a specific family of programs, and limited to a fixed security game.

We establish a set of zero-knowledge arguments that allow for the hashing of a committed secret $a$-bit input $x$ to a committed secret $(k+1)$-bit prime number $p_x$. The zero-knowledge arguments can convince a verifier that a commitment indeed is the correctly generated prime number derived from $x$ with a soundness error probability of at most $2^{-k}+ 2^{-t}$ dependent on the number of zero-knowledge argument rounds $k$ and the number of primality bases $t$ to establish primality. Our constructions offer a range of contributions including enabling dynamic encodings for prime-based accumulator, signature and attribute-based credential schemes allowing to reduce these schemes' public key size and setup requirements considerably and rendering them extensible. While our new primality zero-knowledge arguments are of independent interest, we also show improvements on proving that a secret number is the product of two secret safe primes significantly more efficient than previously known results, with applications to setting up secure special RSA moduli.

Creating a good deep learning (DL) model is an art which requires expertise in DL and a large set of labeled data for training neural networks. Neither is readily available. In this paper, we introduce a method which enables us to achieve good results with bad DL models. We use simple multilayer perceptron (MLP) networks, trained on a small dataset, which make strongly biased predictions if used without the proposed method. The core idea is to extend the attack dataset so that at least one of its traces has the ground truth label to which the models are biased towards. The effectiveness of the presented method is demonstrated by attacking an ARM Cortex-M4 CPU implementation of Saber KEM, a finalist of the NIST post-quantum cryptography standardization project, on a nRF52832 system-on-chip supporting Bluetooth 5, using amplitude-modulated EM emanations. Previous amplitude-modulated EM emanation-based attacks on Saber KEM could not recover its messages with a sufficiently high probability. We recover messages with the probability 1 from the profiling device and with the probability 0.74 from a different device. Using messages recovered from chosen ciphertexts, we extract the secret key of Saber KEM.

We give an efficient construction of a computational non-interactive witness indistinguishable (NIWI) proof in the plain model, and investigate notions of extraction for NIZKs for algebraic languages. Our starting point is the recent work of Couteau and Hartmann (CRYPTO 2020) who developed a new framework (CH framework) for constructing non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs and arguments under falsifiable assumptions for a large class of languages called algebraic languages. In this paper, we construct an efficient NIWI proof in the plain model for algebraic languages based on the CH framework. In the plain model, our NIWI construction is more efficient for algebraic languages than state-of-the-art Groth-Ostrovsky-Sahai (GOS) NIWI (JACM 2012). Next, we explore knowledge soundness of NIZK systems in the CH framework. We define a notion of strong f-extractability, and show that the CH proof system satisfies this notion. We then put forth a new definition of knowledge soundness called semantic extraction. We explore the relationship of semantic extraction with existing knowledge soundness definitions and show that it is a general definition that recovers black-box and non-black-box definitions as special cases. Finally, we show that NIZKs for algebraic languages in the CH framework cannot satisfy semantic extraction. We extend this impossibility to a class of NIZK arguments over algebraic languages, namely quasi-adaptive NIZK arguments that are constructed from smooth projective hash functions.

The 5G mobile communication network provides seamless communications between users and service providers and promises to achieve several stringent requirements, such as seamless mobility and massive connectivity. Although 5G can offer numerous benefits, security and privacy issues still need to be addressed. For example, the inclusion of small cell networks (SCN) into 5G brings the network closer to the connected users, providing a better quality of services (QoS), resulting in a significant increase in the number of Handover procedures (HO), which will affect the security, latency and efficiency of the network. It is then crucial to design a scheme that supports seamless handovers through secure authentication to avoid the consequences of SCN. To address this issue, this article proposes a secure region-based handover scheme with user anonymity and an efficient revocation mechanism that supports seamless connectivity for SCNs in 5G. In this context, we introduce three privacy-preserving authentication protocols, i.e., initial authentication protocol, intra-region handover protocol and inter-region handover protocol, for dealing with three communication scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to consider the privacy and security in both the intra-region and inter-region handover scenarios in 5G communication. Detailed security and performance analysis of our proposed scheme is presented to show that it is resilient against many security threats, is cost-effective in computation and provides an efficient solution for the 5G enabled mobile communication.