International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The Department of Mathematics at the University of Georgia invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position starting August 2023. Applicants should hold a Ph.D. in Mathematics or related field at the time of appointment. Candidates for this position should have a strong research background/record in Cryptography and demonstrate a commitment to excellence in teaching and mentoring undergraduate and graduate students. Complete applications must be received by December 1, 2022, to ensure full consideration, but review will continue until the position is filled.

The University of Georgia (UGA) is making significant investments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Science to address some of society’s most urgent challenges. To this end, UGA has established the Presidential Interdisciplinary Faculty Hiring Initiative in Data Science and AI, which aims to recruit 50 new faculty members within the next two years who will educate students and advance research in Data Science and AI, including both foundational research and applied research in cross-cutting areas such as cybersecurity, cyber-physical systems, infectious diseases, integrative precision agriculture, ethics, resilient communities and the environment.

Within UGA’s broad initiative, the School of Computing, in collaboration with the Department of Mathematics and the UGA Institute for Cybersecurity and Privacy, has established a cluster hire initiative on Secure AI Systems that can support a variety of sensitive applications, including (but not limited to) secure, privacy-preserving, and efficient learning for biomedical applications. This cluster hire initiative aims to hire four new faculty members over two years in the following areas of research: Cryptography (this position), Applied Cryptography with applications to Machine Learning systems and algorithms, Computer Vision, and High-Performance AI Systems.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Prof. Dino Lorenzini Chair of the Hiring Search Committee

More information: https://www.ugajobsearch.com/postings/284491

The ambition of CryptoExperts is to develop innovative technologies in cryptography to meet the emerging needs of the security industry. This ambition is reflected through a team of multi-experts in cryptography and engineers endowed with a particular taste for research, innovation and practical applications.

As software engineer you will be working alongside a team of cryptographers to address the needs of CryptoExperts’ customers in terms of software development and evaluation. You will contribute to the internal R&D effort of the company, notably in terms of design and implementation of

• cryptographic libraries targeting high efficiency and high security in constrained environments (e.g. embedded systems),
• a framework for the design and implementation of white-box cryptography components (compilation and obfuscation).

You will also be involved in various applied research projects and contribute to the development of prototypes of innovative cryptographic protocols and applications.

Please refer to the full job offer for complete information.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Matthieu Rivain

More information: https://www.cryptoexperts.com/job-offer-software-engineer.pdf

The ambition of CryptoExperts is to develop innovative technologies in cryptography to meet the emerging needs of the security industry. This ambition is reflected through a team of multi-experts in cryptography and engineers endowed with a particular taste for research, innovation and practical applications.

As a cryptography expert, you will contribute to R&D and consulting missions for various customers, including

• security assessments for systems/applications that involve cryptography,
• development of secure and optimized cryptographic libraries,
• feasibility study and the tailor-made design of specific cryptographic solutions.

You will also take part to various research projects of the company on topics such as homomorphic encryption, white-box cryptography, post-quantum cryptography, secure cryptographic implementations, security proofs against side-channel attacks, zero-knowledge proofs.

Please refer to the full job offer for complete information.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Matthieu Rivain

More information: https://www.cryptoexperts.com/job-offer-cryptography-expert.pdf

With the recent availability of cloud quantum computing services, the question of verifying quantum computations delegated by a client to a quantum server is becoming of practical interest. While Verifiable Blind Quantum Computing (VBQC) has emerged as one of the key approaches to address this challenge, current protocols still need to be optimised before they are truly practical.

To this end, we establish a fundamental correspondence between error-detection and verification and provide sufficient conditions to both achieve security in the Abstract Cryptography framework and optimise resource overheads of all known VBQC-based protocols. As a direct application, we demonstrate how to systematise the search for new efficient and robust verification protocols for $\mathsf{BQP}$ computations. While we have chosen Measurement-Based Quantum Computing (MBQC) as the working model for the presentation of our results, one could expand the domain of applicability of our framework via direct known translation between the circuit model and MBQC.

In this work, we present a tool for the automated super optimization of Armv8.1-M + Helium assembly on Cortex-M55. It consists of two parts: Firstly, a generic framework SLOTHY - [S]uper ([L]azy) [O]ptimization of [T]ricky [H]andwritten assembl[Y] - for expressing the super optimization of small pieces of assembly as a constraint satisfaction problem which can be handed to an external solver -- concretely, we pick CP-SAT from Google OR-Tools. Secondly, an instantiation Helight55 of SLOTHY with the Armv8.1-M architecture and aspects of the Cortex-M55 microarchitecture. We demonstrate the power of SLOTHY and Helight55 by using it to optimize two workloads: First, a radix-4 complex Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) in fixed-point arithmetic, fundamental in Digital Signal Processing. Second, the instances of the Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) underlying CRYSTALS-Kyber and CRYSTALS-Dilithium, two recently announced winners of the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography standardization project.

We initiate the study of Private Certifier Intersection (PCI), which allows mutually distrusting parties to establish a trust basis for cross-validation of claims if they have one or more trust authorities (certifiers) in common. This is one of the essential requirements for verifiable presentations in Web 3.0, since it provides additional privacy without compromising on decentralization. A PCI protocol allows two or more parties holding certificates to identify a common set of certifiers while additionally validating the certificates issued by such certifiers, without leaking any information about the certifiers not in the output intersection. In this paper, we formally define the notion of multi-party PCI in the Simplified-UC framework for two different settings depending on whether certificates are required for any of the claims (called PCI-Any) or all of the claims (called PCI-All). We then design and implement two provably secure and practically efficient PCI protocols supporting validation of digital signature-based certificates: a PCI-Any protocol for ECDSA-based certificates and a PCI-All protocol for BLS-based certificates. The technical centerpiece of our proposals is the first secretsharing-based MPC framework supporting efficient computation of elliptic curve-based arithmetic operations, including elliptic curve pairings, in a black-box way. We implement this framework by building on top of the well-known MP-SPDZ library using OpenSSL and RELIC for elliptic curve operations, and use this implementation to benchmark our proposed PCI protocols in the LAN and WAN settings. In an intercontinental WAN setup with parties located in different continents, our protocols execute in less than a minute on input sets of size 40, which demonstrates the practicality of our proposed solutions.

Indistinguishability obfuscation (IO) is at the frontier of cryptography research. Lin16/Lin17 obfuscation schemes are famous progresses towards simplifying obfuscation mechanism. Their basic structure can be described in the following way: to obfuscate a polynomial-time-computable Boolean function $c(x)$, first divide it into a group of component functions with low-degree and low-locality by using randomized encoding, and then hide the shapes of these component functions by using constant-degree multilinear maps (rather than polynomial degree ones).

In this short paper we point out that Lin16/Lin17 schemes are invalid. More detailedly, they cannot achieve reusability, therefore they are not true IO schemes, but rather garbling schemes which are one-time schemes.

In this paper, we propose Garrison, which is a payment channel with watchtower for Bitcoin. For this scheme, the storage requirements of both channel parties and their watchtower would be O(log(N)) with N being the maximum number of channel updates. Furthermore, using properties of the adaptor signature, Garrison avoids state duplication, meaning that both parties store the same version of transactions for each state and hence the number of transactions does not exponentially increase with the number of applications on top of the channel.

This paper proposes Addax, a fast, verifiable, and private online ad exchange. When a user visits an ad-supported site, Addax runs an auction similar to those of leading exchanges; Addax requests bids, selects the winner, collects payment, and displays the ad to the user. A key distinction is that bids in Addax’s auctions are kept private and the outcome of the auction is publicly verifiable. Addax achieves these properties by adding public verifiability to the affine aggregatable encodings in Prio (NSDI’17) and by building an auction protocol out of them. Our implementation of Addax over WAN with hundreds of bidders can run roughly half the auctions per second as a non-private and non-verifiable exchange, while delivering ads to users in under 600 ms with little additional bandwidth requirements. This efficiency makes Addax the first architecture capable of bringing transparency to this otherwise opaque ecosystem.

Approximated homomorphic encryption (HE) schemes such as CKKS are commonly used to perform computations over encrypted real numbers. It is commonly assumed that these schemes are not “exact” and thus they cannot execute circuits with unbounded depth over discrete sets, such as binary or integer numbers, without error overflows. These circuits are usually executed using BGV and B/FV for integers and TFHE for binary numbers. This artificial separation can cause users to favor one scheme over another for a given computation, without even exploring other, perhaps better, options.

We show that by treating step functions as “clean-up” utilities and by leveraging the SIMD capabilities of CKKS, we can extend the homomorphic encryption toolbox with efficient tools. These tools use CKKS to run unbounded circuits that operate over binary and small-integer elements and even combine these circuits with fixed-point real numbers circuits. We demonstrate the results using the Turing-complete Conway’s Game of Life. In our evaluation, for boards of size 128x128, these tools achieved an order of magnitude faster latency than previous implementations using other HE schemes. We argue and demonstrate that for large enough real-world inputs, performing binary circuits over CKKS, while considering it as an “exact” scheme, results in comparable or even better performance than using other schemes tailored for similar inputs.

The advent of quantum computers brought a large interest in post-quantum cryptography and in the migration to quantum-resistant systems. Protocols for Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) are among the fundamental scenarios touched by this need. The core concept of SSI is to move the control of digital identity from third-party identity providers directly to individuals. This is achieved through Verificable Credentials (VCs) supporting anonymity and selective disclosure. In turn, the implementation of VCs requires cryptographic signature schemes compatible with a proper Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) framework. We describe the two main ZKP VCs schemes based on classical cryptographic assumptions, that is, the signature scheme with efficient protocols of Camenisch and Lysyanskaya, which is based on the strong RSA assumption, and the BBS+ scheme of Boneh, Boyen and Shacham, which is based on the strong Diffie-Hellman assumption. Since these schemes are not quantum-resistant, we select as one of the possible post-quantum alternatives a lattice-based scheme proposed by Jeudy, Roux-Langlois, and Sander, and we try to identify the open problems for achieving VCs suitable for selective disclosure, non-interactive renewal mechanisms, and efficient revocation.

Motivated by applications to cold-storage solutions for ECDSA-based cryptocurrencies, we present a new ECDSA protocol between $n$ ``online'' parties and a single ``offline'' party. Our protocol tolerates all-but-one adaptive corruptions, and it achieves full proactive security. Our protocol improves as follows over the state of the art.

** The preprocessing phase for calculating preprocessed data for future signatures is lightweight and non-interactive; it consists of each party sending a single independently-generated short message per future signature per online party (approx.~300B for typical choice of parameters).

** The signing phase is asymmetric in the following sense; to calculate the signature, it is enough for the offline party to receive a single short message from the online ``world'' (approx.~300B).

We note that all previous ECDSA protocols require many rounds of interaction between all parties, and thus all previous protocols require extensive ``interactive time'' from the offline party. In contrast, our protocol requires minimal involvement from the offline party, and it is thus ideal for MPC-based cold storage.

Our main technical innovation for achieving the above is twofold: First, building on recent protocols, we design a two-party protocol that we non-generically compile into a highly efficient $(n+1)$-party protocol. Second, we present a new batching technique for proving in zero-knowledge that the plaintext values of practically any number of Paillier ciphertexts lie in a given range. The cost of the resulting (batched) proof is very close to the cost of the underlying single-instance proof of MacKenzie and Reiter (CRYPTO'01, IJIS'04). We prove security in the UC framework, in the global random oracle model, assuming Strong RSA, semantic security of Paillier encryption, DDH, and enhanced existential unforgeability of ECDSA; these assumptions are widely used in the threshold-ECDSA literature and many commercially-available MPC-based wallets.

Lightning Network (LN), the most widely deployed payment channel for Bitcoin, requires channel parties to generate and store distinct revocation keys for all n payments of a channel to resolve fraudulent channel closures. To reduce the required storage in a payment channel, eltoo introduces a new signature type for Bitcoin to enable payment versioning. This allows a channel party to revoke all old payments by using a payment with a higher version number, reducing the storage complexity from O(n) to O(1). However, eltoo fails to achieve bounded closure, enabling a dishonest channel party to significantly delay the channel closure process. Eltoo also lacks a punishment mechanism, which may incentivize profit-driven channel parties to close a payment channel with an old state, to their own advantage.

This paper introduces Daric, a payment channel with unlimited lifetime for Bitcoin that achieves optimal storage and bounded closure. Moreover, Daric implements a punishment mechanism and simultaneously avoids the methods other schemes commonly use to enable punishment: 1) state duplication which leads to exponential increase in the number of transactions with the number of applications on top of each other or 2) dedicated design of adaptor signatures which introduces compatibility issues with BLS or most post-quantum resistant digital signatures. We also formalise Daric and prove its security in the Universal Composability model.

Recent works of Roughgarden (EC'21) and Chung and Shi (Highlights Beyond EC'22) initiate the study of a new decentralized mechanism design problem called transaction fee mechanism design (TFM). Unlike the classical mechanism design literature, in the decentralized environment, even the auctioneer (i.e., the miner) can be a strategic player, and it can even collude with a subset of the users facilitated by binding side contracts. Chung and Shi showed two main impossibility results that rule out the existence of a dream TFM. First, any TFM that provides incentive compatibility for individual users and miner-user coalitions must always have zero miner revenue, no matter whether the block size is finite or infinite. Second, assuming finite block size, no non-trivial TFM can simultaenously provide incentive compatibility for any individual user, and for any miner-user coalition.

In this work, we explore what new models and meaningful relaxations can allow us to circumvent the impossibility results of Chung and Shi. Besides today’s model that does not employ cryptography, we introduce a new MPC-assisted model where the TFM is implemented by a joint multi-party computation (MPC) protocol among the miners. We prove several feasibility and infeasibility results for achieving strict and approximate incentive compatibility, respectively, in the plain model as well as the MPC-assisted model. We show that while cryptography is not a panacea, it indeed allows us to overcome some impossibility results pertaining to the plain model, leading to non-trivial mechanisms with useful guarantees that are otherwise impossible in the plain model. Our work is also the first to characterize the mathematical landscape of transaction fee mechanism design under approximate incentive compatibility, as well as in a cryptography-assisted model.

Ring signatures allow signers to produce verifiable signatures and remain anonymous within a set of signers (i.e., the ring) while doing so. They are well-suited to protocols that target anonymity as a primary goal, for example, anonymous cryptocurrencies. However, standard ring signatures do not ensure that signers are held accountable if they act maliciously. Fraser and Quaglia (CANS'21) introduced a ring signature variant that they called report and trace ring signatures which balances the anonymity guarantee of standard ring signatures with the need to hold signers accountable. In particular, report and trace ring signatures introduce a reporting system whereby ring members can report malicious message/signature pairs. A designated tracer can then revoke the signer's anonymity if, and only if, a ring member submits a report to the tracer. Fraser and Quaglia present a generic construction of a report and trace ring signature scheme and outline an instantiation for which it is claimed that the complexity of signing is linear in the size of the ring $|R|$. In this paper, we introduce a new instantiation of Fraser and Quaglia's generic report and trace ring signature construction. Our instantiation uses a pairing-based variant of ElGamal that we define. We demonstrate that our instantiation is more efficient. In fact, we highlight that the efficiency of Fraser and Quaglia's instantiation omits a scaling factor of $\lambda$ where $\lambda$ is a security parameter. As such, the complexity of signing for their instantiation grows linearly in $\lambda \cdot |R|$. Our instantiation, on the other hand, achieves signing complexity linear in $|R|$. We also introduce a new pairing-free report and trace ring signature construction reaching a similar signing complexity. Whilst this construction requires some additional group exponentiations, it can be instantiated over any prime order group for which the Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption holds.

A Bloom filter is a data structure that maintains a succinct and probabilistic representation of a set $S\subseteq U$ of elements from a universe $U$. It supports approximate membership queries. The price of the succinctness is allowing some error, namely false positives: for any $x\notin S$, it might answer `Yes' but with a small (non-negligible) probability. When dealing with such data structures in adversarial settings, we need to define the correctness guarantee and formalize the requirement that bad events happen infrequently and those false positives are appropriately distributed. Recently, several papers investigated this topic, suggesting different robustness definitions. In this work we unify this line of research and propose several robustness notions for Bloom filters that allow the adaptivity of queries. The goal is that a robust Bloom filter should behave like a random biased coin even against an adaptive adversary. The robustness definitions are expressed by the type of test that the Bloom filter should withstand. We explore the relationships between these notions and highlight the notion of Bet-or-Pass as capturing the desired properties of such a data structure.

The paper introduces a new AEAD-mode called sMGM (strong Multilinear Galois Mode). The proposed construction can be treated as an extension of the Russian standardized MGM mode and its modification MGM2 mode presented at the CTCrypt'21 conference. The distinctive feature of the new mode is that it provides an interface allowing one to choose specific security properties required for a certain application case. Namely, the mode has additional parameters allowing to switch on/off misuse-resistance or re-keying mechanisms. The sMGM mode consists of two main "building blocks" that are a CTR-style gamma generation function with incorporated re-keying and a multilinear function that lies in the core of the original MGM mode. Different ways of using these functions lead to achieving different sets of security properties. Such an approach to constructing parameterizable AEAD-mode allows for reducing the code size which can be crucial for constrained devices. We provide security bounds for the proposed mode. We focus on proving the misuse-resistance of the sMGM mode, since the standard security properties were already analyzed during the development of the original MGM and MGM2 modes.

TCC 2022 will take place in Chicago, USA on November 7-10 2022.

The registration site is now open: https://tcc.iacr.org/2022/registration.php

With the advancement of blockchain technology, hundreds of cryptocurrencies have been deployed. The bloom of heterogeneous blockchain platforms brings a new emerging problem: typically, various blockchains are isolated systems, how to securely identify and/or transfer digital properties across blockchains? There are three main kinds of cross-chain approaches: sidechains/relays, notaries, and hashed time-lock contracts. Among them, notary-based cross-chain solutions have the best compatibility and user-friendliness, but they are typically centralized. To resolve this issue, we present Bool Network -- an open, distributed, secure cross-chain notary platform powered by MPC-based distributed key management over evolving hidden committees. More specifically, to protect the identities of the committee members, we propose a Ring verifiable random function (Ring VRF) protocol, where the real public key of a VRF instance can be hidden among a ring, which may be of independent interest to other cryptographic protocols. Furthermore, all the key management procedures are executed in the TEE, such as Intel SGX, to ensure the privacy and integrity of partial key components. A prototype of the proposed Bool Network is implemented in Rust language, using Polkadot Substrate.

Isogeny-based cryptography suffers from a long-running time due to its requirement of a great amount of large integer arithmetic. The Residue Number System (RNS) can compensate for that drawback by making computation more efficient via parallelism. However, performing a modular reduction by a large prime which is not part of the RNS base is very expensive. In this paper, we propose a new fast and efficient modular reduction algorithm using RNS. Our method reduces the number of required multiplications by 40\% compared to RNS Montgomery modular reduction algorithm. Also, we evaluate our modular reduction method by realizing a cryptoprocessor for isogeny-based SIDH key exchange. On a Xilinx Ultrascale+ FPGA, the proposed cryptoprocessor consumes 151,009 LUTs, 143,171 FFs and 1,056 DSPs. It achieves 250 MHz clock frequency and finishes the key exchange for SIDH in 3.8 and 4.9 ms.