IACR News
Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:
14 November 2022
University of York, UK
Job PostingThe Department of Computer Science is a research-intensive department made up of over 70 academics delivering on-campus programmes to more than 800 students and online courses to over 1500 students. Our vision is to be internationally leading on education and research into engineering safe, ethical and secure computational systems.
The Department of Computer Science is recruiting up to six lecturers to support the development and delivery of our degree programmes at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. This would include the ability to teach across our general range of subjects as well as more specialist modules in their own research area. We are particularly seeking candidates who enhance our existing research groups. Candidates must be able to supervise projects in one or more of the following key areas: Cyber Security, Artificial Intelligence and Data Analysis. We would consider candidates with non-traditional academic backgrounds where they have significant experience of working with, or in, a safety-critical industry.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: For informal enquiries: please contact Prof. Iain Bate at iain.bate@york.ac.uk.
More information: https://jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/lecturers-505454.html
Monash University, Department of Software Systems and Cybersecurity; Melbourne, Australia
Job PostingThe post-quantum cryptography research group at the Department of Software Systems and Cybersecurity, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia, has Ph.D. student scholarship openings for research projects funded by our Algorand Centre of Excellence ACE-SIP Program, including in particular the following areas:
1. Post-quantum cryptographic primitives and their practical applications in blockchain protocols.
2. Post-quantum Zero Knowledge Proof and SNARK protocols and their applications for privacy preserving blockchain transactions and smart contracts.
Students will have the opportunity to work in an excellent research environment and collaborate with experts in cryptography and blockchain systems, and with Algorand industry partners.
Monash University is among the leading universities in Australia and is located in Melbourne, ranked as Australia's most liveable city and among the most liveable cities in the world.
Applicants should have (or expected to complete in the next 12 months) a Masters or Honours equivalent qualification with a research thesis, with excellent grades in mathematics, theoretical computer science, cryptography, or closely related areas. They should have excellent English verbal and written communication skills. Programming experience and skills, especially in Sagemath/python/Magma and/or C/C++, are also highly desirable.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: To apply, email ron.steinfeld@monash.edu by 30 Nov 2022 with the subject “Algorand ACE PQC PhD Application” and attach a single pdf with cover letter stating research interests, CV (including qualifications with GPA grades, reference contact details), and ugrad and pgrad transcripts.
More information: http://ace-sip.org/
North Carolina State University
Job Posting
To apply for the position, please send the following to aaysu@ncsu.edu :
1) Your detailed CV.
2) Your relevant publications (or pending papers).
Applicants with MS and industry experience will be favored. The projects cover full tuition fee, benefits (including health insurance), and the typical annual stipend in my group is $30k-35k – exceptions can be made for outstanding applicants.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Dr. Aydin Aysu (aaysu@ncsu.edu)
Lucerne University of Applied Sciences
Job PostingClosing date for applications:
Contact: For questions contact Esther Hänggi; applications via the link in the main text
University of Wuppertal, Germany
Job PostingWe are looking for new team members with a strong background in cryptography, theoretical computer science, or mathematics and a very strong interest in topics such as (post-quantum secure) cryptographic protocols, concrete security of real-world cryptosystems, and the possibility and impossibility of formal security proofs for practical cryptosystems.
We offer positions in an active research group with a strong research orientation. All positions are fully funded and equipped with a competitive salary (100% E13), and will remain open until filled. The starting date can be arranged flexibly, in the period from spring to summer 2023.
The city of Wuppertal is centrally located and offers a wide range of attracttions at affordable living costs. Cities such as Cologne, Düsseldorf, Essen and the Ruhr area can be reached in under 30 minutes by public transportation. Wuppertal was listed as one of the 20 best places to visit by CNN Travel in 2020 (https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/places-to-visit-2020/index.html).
Please contact Tibor Jager or the team members for further information on the positions, the group, or the environment.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Tibor Jager
More information: https://itsc.uni-wuppertal.de/en/
11 November 2022
Helger Lipmaa, Roberto Parisella
ePrint ReportGongxian Zeng, Junzuo Lai, Zhengan Huang, Yu Wang, Zhiming Zheng
ePrint ReportIn this paper, we mainly focus on PoK protocols for $k$-conjunctive normal form ($k$-CNF) relations, which have $n$ statements and can be expressed as follows: (i) $k$ statements constitute a clause via ``OR'' operations, and (ii) the relation consists of multiple clauses via ``AND'' operations. We propose an alternative Sigma protocol (called DAG-$\Sigma$ protocol) for $k$-CNF relations (in the discrete logarithm setting), by converting these relations to directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). Our DAG-$\Sigma$ protocol achieves less communication cost and smaller computational overhead compared with Cramer et al.'s general method.
Gennaro Avitabile, Vincenzo Botta, Dario Fiore
ePrint ReportIn this paper, we first point out that even if anonymous count me in was suggested as an application of ETRS, the anonymity notion proposed in the previous work is insufficient in many application scenarios. Indeed, the existing notion guarantees anonymity only against adversaries who just see the last signature, and are not allowed to access the ''full evolution" of an ETRS. This is in stark contrast with applications where partial signatures are posted in a public bulletin board. We therefore propose stronger anonymity definitions and construct a new ETRS that satisfies such definitions. Interestingly, while satisfying stronger anonymity properties, our ETRS asymptotically improves on the two ETRS presented in prior work [PKC 2022] in terms of both time complexity and signature size. Our ETRS relies on extendable non-interactive witness-indistinguishable proof of knowledge (ENIWI PoK), a novel technical tool that we formalize and construct, and that may be of independent interest. We build our constructions from pairing groups under the SXDH assumption.
Orr Dunkelman, Shibam Ghosh, Eran Lambooij
ePrint Report10 November 2022
Kaisa Nyberg
ePrint ReportArantxa Zapico, Ariel Gabizon, Dmitry Khovratovich, Mary Maller, Carla Ràfols
ePrint ReportPranav Verma, Anish Mathuria, Sourish Dasgupta
ePrint ReportIn this work, we employ private sorting at the server to reduce the user-side overheads. In private sorting, the values and corresponding positions of elements must remain private. We use an existing private sorting protocol by Foteini and Olga and tailor it to the privacy-preserving top-k recommendation applications. We enhance it to use secure bit decomposition in the private comparison routine of the protocol. This leads to a notable reduction in cost overheads of users as well as the servers, especially at the keyserver where the computation cost is reduced to half. The dataserver does not have to perform costly encryption and decryption operations. It performs computationally less expensive modular exponentiation operations. Since the private comparison operation contributes significantly to the overall cost overhead, making it efficient enhances the sorting protocol’s performance. Our security analysis concludes that the proposed scheme is as secure as the original protocol.
Bhuvnesh Chaturvedi, Anirban Chakraborty, Ayantika Chatterjee, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay
ePrint ReportJack Cable, Andrés Fábrega, Sunoo Park, Michael A. Specter
ePrint ReportPranav Jangir, Nishat Koti, Varsha Bhat Kukkala, Arpita Patra, Bhavish Raj Gopal, Somya Sangal
ePrint ReportShany Ben-David, Yael Tauman Kalai, Omer Paneth
ePrint ReportWe define security by modeling vPIR as an ideal functionality and following the real-ideal paradigm. Starting from a standard PIR scheme, we construct a vPIR scheme for any database property that can be verified by a machine that reads the database once and maintains a bounded size state between rows. We also construct vPIR with public verification based on LWE or on DLIN. The main technical hurdle is to demonstrate a simulator that extracts a long input from an adversary that sends a single short message.
Our vPIR constructions are based on the notion of batch argument for NP. As contribution of independent interest, we show that batch arguments are equivalent to quasi-arguments---a relaxation of SNARKs which is known to imply succinct argument for various sub-classes of NP.