International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We introduce Multimodal Private Signature (MPS) - an anonymous signature system that offers a novel accountability feature: it allows a designated opening authority to learn some partial information $\mathsf{op}$ about the signer's identity $\mathsf{id}$, and nothing beyond. Such partial information can flexibly be defined as $\mathsf{op} = \mathsf{id}$ (as in group signatures), or as $\mathsf{op} = \mathbf{0}$ (like in ring signatures), or more generally, as $\mathsf{op} = G_j(\mathsf{id})$, where $G_j(\cdot)$ is a certain disclosing function. Importantly, the value of $\mathsf{op}$ is known in advance by the signer, and hence, the latter can decide whether she/he wants to disclose that piece of information. The concept of MPS significantly generalizes the notion of tracing in traditional anonymity-oriented signature primitives, and can enable various new and appealing privacy-preserving applications.

We formalize the definitions and security requirements for MPS. We next present a generic construction to demonstrate the feasibility of designing MPS in a modular manner and from commonly used cryptographic building blocks (ordinary signatures, public-key encryption and NIZKs). We also provide an efficient construction in the standard model based on pairings, and a lattice-based construction in the random oracle model.

We initiate research into efficiently embedding probabilistic computations in probabilistic proofs by introducing techniques for capturing Monte Carlo methods and Las Vegas algorithms in zero knowledge and exploring several potential applications of these techniques. We design and demonstrate a technique for proving the integrity of certain randomized computations, such as uncertainty quantification methods, in non-interactive zero knowledge (NIZK) by replacing conventional randomness with low-discrepancy sequences. This technique, known as the Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) method, functions as a form of weak algorithmic derandomization to efficiently produce adversarial-resistant worst-case uncertainty bounds for the results of Monte Carlo simulations. The adversarial resistance provided by this approach allows the integrity of results to be verifiable both in interactive and non-interactive zero knowledge without the need for additional statistical or cryptographic assumptions.

To test these techniques, we design a custom domain specific language and implement an associated compiler toolchain that builds zkSNARK gadgets for expressing QMC methods. We demonstrate the power of this technique by using this framework to benchmark zkSNARKs for various examples in statistics and physics. Using $N$ samples, our framework produces zkSNARKs for numerical integration problems of dimension $d$ with $O\left(\frac{(\log N)^d}{N}\right)$ worst-case error bounds. Additionally, we prove a new result using discrepancy theory to efficiently and soundly estimate the output of computations with uncertain data with an $O\left(d\frac{\log N}{\sqrt[d]{N}}\right)$ worst-case error bound. Finally, we show how this work can be applied more generally to allow zero-knowledge proofs to capture a subset of decision problems in $\mathsf{BPP}$, $\mathsf{RP}$, and $\mathsf{ZPP}$.

Two-factor authentication(2FA)schemes that rely on a combination of knowledge factors (e.g., PIN) and device possession have gained popularity. Some of these schemes remain secure even against strong adversaries that (a) observe the traffic between a client and server, and (b) have physical access to the client’s device, or its PIN, or breach the server. However, these solutions have several shortcomings; namely, they (i) require a client to remember multiple secret values to prove its identity, (ii) involve several modular exponentiations, and (iii) are in the non-standard random oracle model. In this work, we present a 2FA protocol that resists such a strong adversary while addressing the above shortcomings. Our protocol requires a client to remember only a single secret value/PIN, does not involve any modular exponentiations, and is in a standard model. It is the first one that offers these features without using trusted chipsets. This protocol also imposes up to 40% lower communication overhead than the state-of-the-art solutions do.

Physically Unclonable Functions~(PUFs) have been a potent choice for enabling low-cost, secure communication. However, the state-of-the-art strong PUFs generate single-bit response. So, we propose PUF-COTE: a high throughput architecture based on linear feedback shift register and a strong PUF as the ``base''-PUF. At the same time, we obfuscate the challenges to the ``base''-PUF of the final construction. We experimentally evaluate the quality of the construction by implementing it on Artix 7 FPGAs. We evaluate the statistical quality of the responses~(using NIST SP800-92 test suit and standard PUF metrics: uniformity, uniqueness, reliability, strict avalanche criterion, ML-based modelling), which is a crucial factor for cryptographic applications.

The University of St. Gallen offers the possibility for international post-doctoral fellowships for very qualified post-doc candidates. The fellowship offers a competitive salary and excellent working environment in beautiful Switzerland. The post-doctoral fellow can be hosted at the group of Cybersecurity and Applied Cryptography headed by Prof. Mitrokotsa and work on topics relevant to verifiable computation, secure multi-party computation, provable security, secure and privacy-preserving authentication as well as the introduction of provably secure cryptographic primitives. To receive the fellowship a detailed research proposal need to be submitted by email by the end of August. Use subject ''post-doc fellowship''
First Deadline: 10th of August. As a first selection stage a cv and research statement need to be sent to Prof. Mitrokotsa.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Katerina Mitrokotsa

Qrypt is a post quantum cryptography company building quantum-secure software and hardware in partnership with world-class national laboratories and academic institutions. The foundation of Qrypt technology is published by our experts in peer-reviewed scientific journals and supported by a growing portfolio of international patents. These provably quantum assets produce our Everlasting Security protocol for enduring data security in the quantum age. The Qrypt Principal Engineer will provide technical leadership to deliver advanced cryptographic solutions based on distributed entropy, impervious to even quantum-based attacks. They will guide the Qrypt software engineering team to build, deploy and operate these services on behalf of our customers. Preferred location is New York City but will consider alternate remote locations: Bay Area-CA, Seattle-WA, Austin-TX, RTP-NC, Boston-MA or other remote Responsibilities Be the technical leader for the Qrypt software development team composed of software engineers, mathematicians, physicists and cryptographers Work collaboratively with the Qrypt Cloud Architect to ensure we deliver cryptographic services to our worldwide customers which meets customer SLAs for: Security, Scalability, Availability, Reliability and Usability Cascade the high-level architecture to component teams to ensure every component meets our requirements Mentor software engineers to share your experience designing/building applications and leading others Qualifications 15+ years of design and coding experience of highly-scalable distributed systems using C/C++ and Python 5+ years delivering major public cloud services, preferably Azure, to a global customer base Demonstrated expertise in designing microservices environments Demonstrated expertise in modern security design patterns Demonstrated expertise in Linux, Ubuntu and macOS Experience integrating open-source software, Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes, real-time monitoring, ML-driven data analytics, etc.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Jay Sierra

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

Silence Laboratories is a cybersecurity company that focuses on the fusion of cryptography, sensing, and design to support a seamless authentication experience and infrastructure. We have built unique web3-native decentralized MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) frameworks and MPC-based threshold signature integrations for solving fundamental authentication and signature-related pains faced by businesses. Our libraries are heavily based on proofs-based ecosystem.

We are looking for self-motivated and talented individuals to design best and ready to be deployed cryptographic protocols for decentralized authentication. You will work with a team of engineers, product managers, marketing managers, and salespeople from different backgrounds who are challenging the future of authentication in web3. You will play a crucial role in the code algorithm design team.

Join us to reinvent the future of cybersecurity through innovative mindset.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement cryptographic protocols
• Optimize threshold signature schemes acorss platforms

Qualifications:

• PhD or Masters in Applied Cryptography
• Familiarity with elliptic curve cryptography, signature schemes, zero-knowledge proofs, encryption, etc.
• Ability to understand and build new cryptographic primitives
• Proficient in a modern high level language Python, Ruby, or Go.
• Self-motivated & self-organized

Advantageous Skills:

• Experience with distributed systems and large scale engineering challenges.
• Experience in securing digital assets and cryptocurrencies

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Jay Prakash

Interactive Non-Malleable Codes were introduced by Fleischhacker et al. (TCC 2019) in the two party setting with synchronous tampering. The idea of this type of non-malleable code is that it "encodes" an interactive protocol in such a way that, even if the messages are tampered with according to some class $\mathcal{F}$ of tampering functions, the result of the execution will either be correct, or completely unrelated to the inputs of the participating parties. In the synchronous setting the adversary is able to modify the messages being exchanged but cannot drop messages nor desynchronize the two parties by first running the protocol with the first party and then with the second party. In this work, we define interactive non-malleable codes in the non-synchronous multi-party setting and construct such interactive non-malleable codes for the class $\mathcal{F}^{s}_{\textsf{bounded}}$ of bounded-state tampering functions. The construction is applicable to any multi-party protocol with a fixed message topology.

Orbis Specification Language (OSL) is a language for writing statements to be proven by zk-SNARKs. zk-SNARK theories allow for proving wide classes of statements. They usually require the statement to be proven to be expressed as a constraint system, called an arithmetic circuit, which can take various forms depending on the theory. It is difficult to express complex statements in the form of arithmetic circuits. OSL is a language of statements which is similar to type theories used in proof engineering, such as Agda and Coq. OSL has a feature set which is sufficiently limited to make it feasible to compile a statement expressed in OSL to an arithmetic circuit which expresses the same statement. This work builds on Σ1 arithmetization [5] in Halo 2 [3, 4], by defining a frontend for a user-friendly circuit compiler.

Privacy-oriented cryptocurrencies, like Zcash or Monero, provide fair transaction anonymity and confidentiality but lack important features compared to fully public systems, like Ethereum. Specifically, supporting assets of multiple types and providing a mechanism to atomically exchange them, which is critical for e.g. decentralized finance (DeFi), is challenging in the private setting. By combining insights and security properties from Zcash and SwapCT (PETS 21, an atomic swap system for Monero), we present a simple zk-SNARKs-based transaction scheme, called Zswap, which is carefully malleable to allow the merging of transactions, while preserving anonymity. Our protocol enables multiple assets and atomic exchanges by making use of sparse homomorphic commitments with aggregated open randomness, together with Zcash-friendly simulation-extractable non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proofs. This results in a provably secure privacy-preserving transaction protocol, with efficient swaps, and overall performance close to that of existing deployed private cryptocurrencies. It is similar to Zcash Sapling and benefits from existing code bases and implementation expertise.

The Lai-Massey scheme is an important cryptographic approach to design block ciphers from secure pseudorandom functions. It has been used in the designs of IDEA and IDEA-NXT. At ASIACRYPT'99, Vaudenay showed that the 3-round and 4-round Lai-Massey scheme are secure against chosen-plaintext attacks (CPAs) and chosen-ciphertext attacks (CCAs), respectively, in the classical setting. At SAC'04, Junod and Vaudenay proposed a new family of block ciphers based on the Lai-Massey scheme, namely FOX. In this work, we analyze the security of the FOX cipher in the quantum setting, where the attacker can make quantum superposed queries to the oracle. Our results are as follows:

$-$ The 3-round FOX construction is not a pseudorandom permutation against quantum chosen-plaintext attacks (qCPAs), and the 4-round FOX construction is not a strong pseudorandom permutation against quantum chosen-ciphertext attacks (qCCAs). Essentially, we build quantum distinguishers against the 3-round and 4-round FOX constructions, using Simon's algorithm.

$-$ The 4-round FOX construction is a pseudorandom permutation against qCPAs. Concretely, we prove that the 4-round FOX construction is secure up to $O(2^{n/12})$ quantum queries. Our security proofs use the compressed oracle technique introduced by Zhandry. More precisely, we use an alternative formalization of the compressed oracle technique introduced by Hosoyamada and Iwata.

The security of code-based cryptography relies primarily on the hardness of generic decoding with linear codes. The best generic decoding algorithms are all improvements of an old algorithm due to Prange: they are known under the name of information set decoders (ISD). A while ago, a generic decoding algorithm which does not belong to this family was proposed: statistical decoding. It is a randomized algorithm that requires the computation of a large set of parity-checks of moderate weight, and uses some kind of majority voting on these equations to recover the error. This algorithm was long forgotten because even the best variants of it performed poorly when compared to the simplest ISD algorithm. We revisit this old algorithm by using parity-check equations in a more general way. Here the parity-checks are used to get LPN samples with a secret which is part of the error and the LPN noise is related to the weight of the parity-checks we produce. The corresponding LPN problem is then solved by standard Fourier techniques. By properly choosing the method of producing these low weight equations and the size of the LPN problem, we are able to outperform in this way significantly information set decodings at code rates smaller than $0.3$. It gives for the first time after $60$ years, a better decoding algorithm for a significant range which does not belong to the ISD family.

Multi-Scalar Multiplication (MSM) is a fundamental computational problem. Interest in this problem was recently prompted by its application to ZK-SNARKs, where it often turns out to be the main computational bottleneck. In this paper we set forth a pipelined design for computing MSM. Our design is based on a novel algorithmic approach and hardware-specific optimizations. At the core, we rely on a modular multiplication technique which we deem to be of independent interest. We implemented and tested our design on FPGA. We highlight the promise of optimized hardware over state-of-the-art GPU- based MSM solver in terms of speed and energy expenditure.

The finite field isomorphism FFI problem, introduced in PKC'18, is an alternative to average-case lattice problems (like LWE, SIS, or NTRU). As an application, the FFI problem is used to construct a fully homomorphic encryption scheme in the same paper. In this work, we prove that the decision variant of the FFI problem can be solved in polynomial time for any field characteristics $q= \Omega(\beta n^2)$, where $q,\beta,n$ parametrize the FFI problem. Then we use our result from the FFI distinguisher to propose a polynomial-time attack on the semantic security of the fully homomorphic encryption scheme. Furthermore, for completeness, we also study the search variant of the FFI problem and show how to state it as a $q$-ary lattice problem, which was previously unknown. As a result, we can solve the search problem for some previously intractable parameters using a simple lattice reduction approach.

This paper considers the security of CRAFT and WARP. We present a practical key-recovery attack on full-round CRAFT in the related-key setting with only one differential characteristic, and the theoretical time complexity of the attack is $2^{36.09}$ full-round encryptions. The attack is verified in practice. The test result indicates that the theoretical analysis is valid, and it takes about $15.69$ hours to retrieve the key. A full-round key-recovery attack on WARP in the related-key setting is proposed, and the time complexity is $2^{44.58}$ full-round encryptions. The theoretical attack is implemented on a round-reduced version of WARP, which guarantees validity. Besides, we give a 33-round multiple zero-correlation linear attack on WARP, which is the longest attack on the cipher in the single-key attack setting. We note that the attack results in this paper do not threaten the security of CRAFT and WARP as the designers do not claim security under the related-key attack setting.

To reduce the workload of the Trusted Platform Module~(TPM) without affecting the security in pairing-based direct anonymous attestation~(DAA) schemes, it is feasible to select pairing-friendly curves that provide fast group operations in the first pairing subgroup. In this scenario, the BW13-P310 and BW19-P286 curves become competitive. In order to improve the efficiency of the DAA schemes based on these curves, it is also necessary to design an efficient algorithm for hashing to $G_2$. In this paper, we first generalize the previous work to address the bottlenecks involved in hashing to $G_2$ on the two curves. On this basis, we further optimize the hashing algorithm, which would be nearly twice as fast as the previous one in theory. These techniques actually can be applied to a large class of curves. We also implement the proposed algorithms over the BW13-P310 curve on a 64-bit computing platform.

Consider a computer user who needs to update a piece of software installed on their computing device. To do so securely, a commonly accepted ad-hoc method stipulates that the old software version first retrieves the update information from the vendor's public repository, then checks that a cryptographic signature embedded into it verifies with the vendor's public key, and finally replaces itself with the new version. This updating method seems to be robust and lightweight, and to reliably ensure that no malicious third party (e.g., a distribution mirror) can inject harmful code into the update process. Unfortunately, recent prominent news reports (SolarWinds, Stuxnet, TikTok, Zoom, ...) suggest that nation state adversaries are broadening their efforts related to attacking software supply chains. This calls for a critical re-evaluation of the described signature based updating method with respect to the real-world security it provides against particularly powerful adversaries.

We approach the setting by formalizing a cryptographic primitive that addresses specifically the secure software updating problem. We define strong, rigorous security models that capture forward security (stealing a vendor's key today doesn't allow modifying yesterday's software version) as well as a form of self-enforcement that helps protecting vendors against coercion attacks in which they are forced, e.g. by nation state actors, to misuse or disclose their keys. We note that the common signature based software authentication method described above meets neither the one nor the other goal, and thus represents a suboptimal solution. Hence, after formalizing the syntax and security of the new primitive, we propose novel, efficient, and provably secure constructions.

Succinct arguments allow a prover to convince a verifier that a given statement is true, using an extremely short proof. A major bottleneck that has been the focus of a large body of work is in reducing the overhead incurred by the prover in order to prove correctness of the computation. By overhead we refer to the cost of proving correctness, divided by the cost of the original computation.

In this work, for a large class of Boolean circuits $C=C(x,w)$, we construct succinct arguments for the language $\{ x : \exists w\; C(x,w)=1\}$, with $2^{-\lambda}$ soundness error, and with prover overhead $\mathsf{polylog}(\lambda)$. This result relies on the existence of (sub-exponentially secure) linear-size computable collision-resistant hash functions. The class of Boolean circuits that we can handle includes circuits with a repeated sub-structure, which arise in natural applications such as batch computation/verification, hashing and related block chain applications.

The succinct argument is obtained by constructing \emph{interactive oracle proofs} for the same class of languages, with $\mathsf{polylog}(\lambda)$ prover overhead, and soundness error $2^{-\lambda}$. Prior to our work, the best IOPs for Boolean circuits either had prover overhead of $\mathsf{polylog}(|C|)$ based on efficient PCPs due to Ben-Sasson et al. (STOC, 2013) or $\mathsf{poly}(\lambda)$ due to Rothblum and Ron-Zewi (STOC, 2022).

In this work, we study the blockchain leader election problem. The purpose of such protocols is to elect a leader who decides on the next block to be appended to the blockchain, for each block proposal round. Solutions to this problem are vital for the security of blockchain systems. We introduce an efficient blockchain leader election method with security based solely on standard assumptions for cryptographic hash functions (rather than public-key cryptographic assumptions) and that does not involve a racing condition as in Proof-of-Work based approaches. Thanks to the former feature, our solution provides the highest confidence in security, even in the post-quantum era. A particularly scalable application of our solution is in the Proof-of-Stake setting, and we investigate our solution in the Algorand blockchain system. We believe our leader election approach can be easily adapted to a range of other blockchain settings.

At the core of Algorand's leader election is a verifiable random function (VRF). Our approach is based on introducing a simpler primitive which still suffices for the blockchain leader election problem. In particular, we analyze the concrete requirements in an Algorand-like blockchain setting to accomplish leader election, which leads to the introduction of indexed VRF (iVRF). An iVRF satisfies modified uniqueness and pseudorandomness properties (versus a full-fledged VRF) that enable an efficient instantiation based on a hash function without requiring any complicated zero-knowledge proofs of correct PRF evaluation. We further extend iVRF to an authenticated iVRF with forward-security, which meets all the requirements to establish an Algorand-like consensus. Our solution is simple, flexible and incurs only a 32-byte additional overhead when combined with the current best solution to constructing a forward-secure signature (in the post-quantum setting).

We implemented our (authenticated) iVRF proposal in C language on a standard computer and show that our proposal significantly outperforms other quantum-safe VRF proposals in almost all metrics. Particularly, iVRF evaluation and verification can be executed in 0.02 ms, which is even faster than ECVRF used in Algorand.

In this note, we study a specific optimization problem arising in the recently proposed coefficient grouping technique, which is used for the degree evaluation. Specifically, we show that there exists an efficient algorithm running in time $\mathcal{O}(n)$ to solve a basic optimization problem relevant to upper bound the algebraic degree. We expect that some results in this note can inspire more studies on other optimization problems in the coefficient grouping technique.