IACR News
Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:
26 January 2023
Tabacaru Robert, Anghel Florin, Asandoaiei David, Simion Emil
Mostefa Kara, Abdelkader Laouid, Mohammad Hammoudeh
Visa Research, Palo Alto CA
Currently, we focus on building research teams in key areas: Data Analytics, Cryptography, and Future of Payment(Blockchain), and Artificial Intelligence. We are looking for outstanding researcher interns as part of the growing team!
Visa Research’s goal of security is to enable policy-enforced, full lifecycle protection for data at rest, in transit and during computation for all payment-related scenarios. We accomplish this through fundamental and applied research in the areas of security and cryptography.
The internship will focus on developing new and impactful research in the chosen area. You will work closely with our team members to define and solve a state of the art research problem. In most cases, the final deliverable will be a research publication at a top-tier conference. Candidates should be able to demonstrate research proficiency (eg existing publications) and be able to perform research in both a group and self-guided setting.
Specific areas of interest include :
- Post Quantum Cryptography
- Quantum Cryptography
- Secure Multiparty Computation
- Zero Knowledge Proofs
- Blockchain & Consensus Protocols
Closing date for applications:
Contact: perindal@visa.com
More information: https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/Visa/743999878021251-intern-visa-research-phd-
University College London
The position provides an excellent opportunity for students to develop cryptographic tools to improve the privacy, scalability, and security of next-generation decentralized systems. Candidates with research interests in one or more of the following areas are particularly encouraged to apply: blockchains and cryptocurrencies, threshold cryptography, multiparty computation, zero-knowledge proofs, consensus, distributed systems, cryptoeconomics. Successful applicants will work in an exciting international environment, conduct cutting-edge research in the above-mentioned fields, and publish and present their results at top venues for research in blockchains, cryptography, and IT security.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Philipp Jovanovic p.jovanovic@ucl.ac.uk
Indian Institute of Technology Jammu, Jammu, India
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Sartaj Ul Hasan (sartaj.hasan[at]iitjammu.ac.in)
More information: https://www.iitjammu.ac.in/post/advt-IITJMU-RC-RP00141-2023-A-18-research-associate
Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
The research focus of the Implementation Security group at the Faculty of Computer Science is on the security of implementations. A large part of our research is dedicated to hardware security, protection against physical attacks (side-channel analysis and fault-injection attacks), security analysis of real-world systems particularly internet of things, and efficient hardware and software implementation of cryptographic primitives including fully homomorphic encryption schemes. This includes various implementation platforms like ASICs, FPGAs, and micro-processors. The Implementation Security group is looking for excellent B.Sc. and M.Sc. graduates with outstanding grades and degrees in computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, and mathematics. In addition, we are looking for outstanding postdoctoral candidates from these fields.
Initially, we offer three-year fully funded positions for B.Sc. and M.Sc. graduates. The expectation is to work towards a doctorate. Postdoctoral positions are initially offered to two years. Both PhD and Postdoctoral positions are subject to extensions. The salary will be according to the remuneration group E 13 TV-L (full time).
Our offerings:
- Excellent research environment with award-winning scientists, Open team culture,
- Programs designed to support parents,
- Support measures for women in IT security,
- Excellent support for doctoral and postdoctoral researchers,
- Opportunities for academic and professional development,
- Budget for courses, conferences, equipment and international exchange
Please send your complete application documents in one single pdf file to: amir.moradi@rub.de. The required documents are: CV, transcript of records of BSc., transcript of records of MSc. (if applicable).
Closing date for applications:
Contact:
Prof. Amir Moradi
https://informatik.rub.de/impsec/personen/moradi/
More information: https://informatik.rub.de/impsec/
University of Southern Queensland, Australia
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Professor Yan Li with email: Yan.Li@usq.edu.au
More information: https://www.unisq.edu.au/handbook/current/sciences/DPHD.html
23 January 2023
Ward Beullens, Vadim Lyubashevsky, Ngoc Khanh Nguyen, Gregor Seiler
Dev M. Mehta, Mohammad Hashemi, David S. Koblah, Domenic Forte, Fatemeh Ganji
Tahoura Mosavirik, Saleh Khalaj Monfared, Maryam Saadat Safa, Shahin Tajik
Geoffroy Couteau, Adi Rosén
In this work we are interested in another question: given a private computation, we ask how many of the players need to have access to a random source, and how many of them can be deterministic parties. We are further interested in the possible interplay between the number of random sources in the system and the total number of random bits necessary for the computation.
We give a number of results. We first show that, perhaps surprisingly, $t$ players (rather than $t+1$) with access to a random source are sufficient for the information-theoretic $t$-private computation of any deterministic functionality over $n$ players for any $t
We then turn to the question of the possible interplay between the number of random sources and the necessary number of random bits. Since for only very few settings in private computation meaningful bounds on the number of necessary random bits are known, we consider the AND function, for which some such bounds are known. We give a new protocol to $1$-privately compute the $n$-player AND function, which uses a single random source and $6$ random bits tossed by that source. This improves, upon the currently best known results (Kushilevitz et al., TCC'19), at the same time the number of sources and the number of random bits (KOPRT19 gives a $2$-source, $8$-bits protocol). This result gives maybe some evidence that for $1$-privacy, using the minimum necessary number of sources one can also achieve the necessary minimum number of random bits. We believe however that our protocol is of independent interest for the study of randomness in private computation.
Peng Yang, Zoe L. Jiang, Shiqi Gao, Jiehang Zhuang, Hongxiao Wang, Junbin Fang, Siuming Yiu, Yulin Wu
We implement the framework in Python and evaluate the end-to-end system for private training between two parties on standard neural networks. FssNN achieves on MNIST dataset an accuracy of 98.0%, with communication cost of 27.52GB and runtime of 0.23h per epoch in the LAN settings. That shows our work advances the state-of-the-art secure computation protocol for neural networks.
Geoffroy Couteau, Maryam Zarezadeh
We give constructions of this primitive from a common template, which can be instantiated under either the LPN (with non-negligible correctness error) or the LWE (with negligible correctness error) assumptions. Our construction uses a novel twist on the standard non-interactive key exchange based on the Alekhnovich cryptosystem, which upgrades it to a non-interactive inner product protocol almost for free. In addition to being non-interactive, our constructions have linear communication (with constants smaller than all known alternatives) and small computation: using LPN or LWE with quasi-cyclic codes, we estimate that encoding a length-$2^{20}$ vector over a 32-bit field takes less that 2s on a standard laptop; decoding amounts to a single cheap inner-product.
We show how to remove the non-negligible error in our LPN instantiation using a one-time, logarithmic-communication preprocessing. Eventually, we show to to upgrade its security to the malicious model using new sublinear-communication zero-knowledge proofs for low-noise LPN samples, which might be of independent interest.
Corina-Elena Bogos, Răzvan Mocanu, Emil Simion
Isac Iulian-George, Emil Simion
Prabhanjan Ananth, Zihan Hu, Henry Yuen
These difficulties call for a deeper and systematic study of the structure of public-key quantum money schemes and the assumptions they can be based on. Motivated by this, we present the first black-box separation of quantum money and cryptographic primitives. Specifically, we show that collision-resistant hash functions cannot be used as a black-box to construct public-key quantum money schemes where the banknote verification makes classical queries to the hash function. Our result involves a novel combination of state synthesis techniques from quantum complexity theory and simulation techniques, including Zhandry's compressed oracle technique.
Shalini Banerjee, Steven D. Galbraith, Giovanni Russello
We design an efficient virtual black-box obfuscator for binary decision trees and use the random oracle paradigm to analyze the security of our construction. To thwart model-extraction attacks, we restrict to evasive decision trees, as black-box access to the classifier does not allow a PPT adversary to extract the model. While doing so, we present an encoder for hiding parameters in an interval-membership function. Our exclusive goal behind designing the obfuscator is that, not only will the solution increase the class of functions that has cryptographically secure obfuscators, but also address the open problem of non-interactive prediction in privacy-preserving classification using computationally inexpensive cryptographic hash functions.
Paulio L. Barreto, Gustavo H. M. Zanon
Lyon, France, 23 April 2023
Submission deadline: 28 February 2023
Notification: 21 March 2023
Kyoto, Japan, 19 June - 22 June 2023
Submission deadline: 17 March 2023
Notification: 19 April 2023