International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We introduce QARMAvii, a redesign of the tweakable block cipher QARMA to provide more robust security bounds and allow for longer tweaks, while keeping very similar latency and area values. The longer tweaks serve to address specific use cases and facilitate the design of modes of operation with higher security bounds. This is achieved by adopting new key and tweak schedules, and by making some changes to the 128-bit versions, as well as by performing a deeper security analysis.

The resulting cipher offers competitive latency and area in HW implementations.

Some of our results may be of independent interest. This includes new MILP models of certain classes of diffusion matrices, the comparative analysis of a full reflection cipher against an iterative half-cipher, and our boomerang attack framework.

Given three positive integers $n

Integer-order Rényi entropies are synthetic indices useful for the characterization of probability distributions. In recent decades, numerous studies have been conducted to arrive at valid estimates of these indices starting from experimental data, so to derive a suitable classification method for the underlying processes. However, optimal solutions have not been reached yet. A one-line formula limited to the estimation of collision entropy is presented here. The results of some specific Monte Carlo experiments gave evidence of its validity even for the very low densities of the data spread in high-dimensional sample spaces. The strengths of this method are unbiased consistency, generality and minimum computational cost.

We present a new attack against the PSSI problem, one of the three problems at the root of security of Durandal, an efficient rank metric code-based signature scheme with a public key size of 15 kB and a signature size of 4 kB, presented at EUROCRYPT'19. Our attack recovers the private key using a leakage of information coming from several signatures produced with the same key. Our approach is to combine pairs of signatures and perform Cramer-like formulas in order to build subspaces containing a secret element. We break all existing parameters of Durandal: the two published sets of parameters claiming a security of 128 bits are broken in respectively $2^{66}$ and $2^{73}$ elementary bit operations, and the number of signatures required to finalize the attack is 1,792 and 4,096 respectively. We implemented our attack and ran experiments that demonstrated its success with smaller parameters.

In this work, we propose the notion of homomorphic indistinguishability obfuscation ($\mathsf{HiO}$) and present a construction based on subexponentially-secure $\mathsf{iO}$ and one-way functions. An $\mathsf{HiO}$ scheme allows us to convert an obfuscation of circuit $C$ to an obfuscation of $C'\circ C$, and this can be performed obliviously (that is, without knowing the circuit $C$). A naive solution would be to obfuscate $C' \circ \mathsf{iO}(C)$. However, if we do this for $k$ hops, then the size of the final obfuscation is exponential in $k$. $\mathsf{HiO}$ ensures that the size of the final obfuscation remains polynomial after repeated compositions. As an application, we show how to build function-hiding hierarchical multi-input functional encryption and homomorphic witness encryption using $\mathsf{HiO}$.

The duplex construction is already well analyzed with many papers proving its security in the random permutation model. However, so far, the first phase of the duplex, where the state is initialized with a secret key and an initialization vector ($\mathit{IV}$), is typically analyzed in a worst case manner. More detailed, it is always assumed that the adversary is allowed to choose the $\mathit{IV}$ on its will. In this paper, we analyze how the security changes if restrictions on the choice of the $\mathit{IV}$ are imposed, varying from the global nonce case over the random $\mathit{IV}$ case to the $\mathit{IV}$ on key case. The last one, in particular, is the duplex analogue of the use of a nonce masked with a secret in AES-GCM in TLS 1.3. We apply our findings to duplex-based encryption and authenticated encryption, and discuss the practical applications of our results.

In this paper, we present video-based cryptanalysis, a new method used to recover secret keys from a device by analyzing video footage of a device’s power LED. We show that cryptographic computations performed by the CPU change the power consumption of the device which affects the brightness of the device’s power LED. Based on this observation, we show how attackers can exploit commercial video cameras (e.g., an iPhone 13’s camera or Internet-connected security camera) to recover secret keys from devices. This is done by obtaining video footage of a device’s power LED (in which the frame is filled with the power LED) and exploiting the video camera’s rolling shutter to increase the sampling rate by three orders of magnitude from the FPS rate (60 measurements per second) to the rolling shutter speed (60K measurements per second in the iPhone 13 Pro Max). The frames of the video footage of the device’s power LED are analyzed in the RGB space, and the associated RGB values are used to recover the secret key by inducing the power consumption of the device from the RGB values. We demonstrate the application of video-based cryptanalysis by performing two side-channel cryptanalytic timing attacks and recover: (1) a 256- bit ECDSA key from a smart card by analyzing video footage of the power LED of a smart card reader via a hijacked Internet-connected security camera located 16 meters away from the smart card reader, and (2) a 378-bit SIKE key from a Samsung Galaxy S8 by analyzing video footage of the power LED of Logitech Z120 USB speakers that were connected to the same USB hub (that was used to charge the Galaxy S8) via an iPhone 13 Pro Max. Finally, we discuss countermeasures, limitations, and the future of video-based cryptanalysis in light of the expected improvements in video cameras’ specifications.

We address the problem of user fast revocation in the lattice based CP-ABE by extending the scheme originally introduced in [A ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption scheme without pairings. J. Zhang, Z. Zhang - ICISC 2011]. While a lot of work exists on the construction of revocable schemes for CP-ABE based on pairings, works based on lattices are not so common, and – to the best of our knowledge – we introduce the first server-aided revocation scheme in a lattice based CP-ABE scheme, hence providing post-quantum safety. In particular, we rely on semi-trusted "mediators" to provide a multi-step decryption capable of handling mediation without re-encryption. We comment on the scheme and its application and we provide performance experiments on a prototype implementation in the ABE spin-off library of Palisade to evaluate the overhead compared with the original scheme.

Comparison of integers, a traditional topic in secure multiparty computation since Yao's pioneering work on "Millionaires' Problem" (FOCS 1982), is also well studied in card-based cryptography. For the problem, Miyahara et al. (Theoretical Computer Science, 2020) proposed a protocol using binary cards (i.e., cards with two kinds of symbols) that is highly efficient in terms of numbers of cards and shuffles, and its extension to number cards (i.e., cards with distinct symbols). In this paper, with a different design strategy which we name "Tug-of-War technique", we propose new protocols based on binary cards and on number cards. For binary cards, our protocol improves the previous protocol asymptotically (in bit lengths of input integers) in terms of numbers of cards and shuffles when adopting ternary encoding of input integers. For number cards, at the cost of increasing the number of cards, our protocol improves the number of shuffles of the previous protocol even with binary encoding, and more with $q$-ary encoding where $q > 2$.

The increase in leakage power from advanced tech nodes elevates the risk of static power side-channel (S-PSC) attacks. While protective measures exist, they involve a security cost trade-off. Hardware Trojans, particularly PSC-based ones, represent another significant threat. Despite acknowledging the link between static power leakage, advanced tech nodes, and vulnerability to S-PSC attacks, the role of the components at the heart of this sensitive interplay – the standard cells – has not been extensively studied in commercial-grade IC design. We analyze this relationship for commercial 28nm and 65nm nodes using a regular AES design. Our CAD framework permits design optimization while assessing S-PSC vulnerability. Contrary to the belief that high-performance designs are more vulnerable, we find timing constraints and threshold-voltage cell ratios are pivotal factors. Also, we discover that an attacker can deploy highly effective, stealthy PSC-based Trojans without any gate overheads or compromising timing paths.

Given $\ell$ parties with sets $X_1, \dots, X_\ell$ of size $n$, we would like to securely compute the intersection $\cap_{i=1}^\ell X_i$, if it is larger than $n-t$ for some threshold $t$, without revealing any other additional information. It has previously been shown (Ghosh and Simkin, Crypto 2019) that this function can be securely computed with a communication complexity that only depends on $t$ and in particular does not depend on $n$. For small values of $t$, this results in protocols that have a communication complexity that is sublinear in the size of the inputs. Current protocols either rely on fully homomorphic encryption or have an at least quadratic dependency on the parameter $t$.

In this work, we construct protocols with a quasilinear dependency on $t$ from simple assumptions like additively homomorphic encryption and oblivious transfer. All existing approaches, including ours, rely on protocols for computing a single bit, which indicates whether the intersection is larger than $n-t$ without actually computing it. Our key technical contribution, which may be of independent interest, takes any such protocol with secret shared outputs and communication complexity $\mathcal{O}(\lambda \ell \cdot\mathrm{poly}(t))$, where $\lambda$ is the security parameter, and transforms it into a protocol with communication complexity $\mathcal{O}(\lambda^2 \ell t \cdot\mathrm{polylog}(t))$.

In this work we study Invertible Bloom Lookup Tables (IBLTs) with small failure probabilities. IBLTs are highly versatile data structures that have found applications in set reconciliation protocols, error-correcting codes, and even the design of advanced cryptographic primitives. For storing $n$ elements and ensuring correctness with probability at least $1 - \delta$, existing IBLT constructions require $\Omega(n(\frac{\log(1/\delta)}{\log(n)}+1))$ space and they crucially rely on fully random hash functions.

We present new constructions of IBLTs that are simultaneously more space efficient and require less randomness. For storing $n$ elements with a failure probability of at most $\delta$, our data structure only requires $\mathcal{O}(n + \log(1/\delta)\log\log(1/\delta))$ space and $\mathcal{O}(\log(\log(n)/\delta))$-wise independent hash functions.

As a key technical ingredient we show that hashing $n$ keys with any $k$-wise independent hash function $h:U \to [Cn]$ for some sufficiently large constant $C$ guarantees with probability $1 - 2^{-\Omega(k)}$ that at least $n/2$ keys will have a unique hash value. Proving this is highly non-trivial as $k$ approaches $n$. We believe that the techniques used to prove this statement may be of independent interest.

A multilinear polynomial is a multivariate polynomial that is linear in each variable. This paper presents a scheme to commit to multilinear polynomials and to later prove evaluations of committed polynomials. The construction of the scheme is generic and relies on additively homomorphic schemes to commit to univariate polynomials. As the construction requires to check that several committed univariate polynomials do not exceed given, separate bounds, the paper also gives a method to batch executions of any degree-check protocol on homomorphic commitments. For a multilinear polynomial in n ≥ 2 variables, the instantiation of the scheme with a hiding version of KZG commitments (Kate, Zaverucha and Goldberg at Asiacrypt 2010) gives a pairing-based scheme with evaluations proofs in which the prover sends n + 3 first-group elements, performs at most 5 · 2n−1 + 1 first-group scalar multiplication and uses only n+2 random field elements to achieve the zero-knowledge property. Verification requires at most 2n + 2 first-group scalar multiplications, two second-group scalar multiplications and three pairing computations.

Payment channels allow a sender to do multiple transactions with a receiver without recording each single transaction on-chain. While most of the current constructions for payment channels focus on UTXO-based cryptocurrencies with reduced scripting capabilities (e.g., Bitcoin or Monero), little attention has been given to the possible benefits of adapting such constructions to cryptocurrencies based on the account model and offering a Turing complete language (e.g., Ethereum). The focus of this work is to implement efficient payment channels tailored to the capabilities of account-based cryptocurrencies with Turing-complete language support in order to provide scalable payments that are interoperable across different cryptocurrencies and unlinkable for third-parties (e.g., payment intermediaries). More concretely, we continue the line of research on cryptocurrency universal payment channels (UPC) which facilitate interoperable payment channel transactions across different ledgers in a hub-and-spoke model, by offering greater scalability than point-to-point architectures. Our design proposes two different versions, UPC and AUPC. For UPC we formally describe the protocol ideas sketched in previous work and evaluate our proof-of-concept implementation. Then, AUPC further extends the concept of universal payment channels by payment unlinkability against the intermediary server.

A Single Sign-On (SSO) system allows users to access different remote services while authenticating only once. SSO can greatly improve the usability and security of online activities by dispensing with the need to securely remember or store tens or hundreds of authentication secrets. On the downside, today's SSO providers can track users' online behavior, and collect personal data that service providers want to see asserted before letting a user access their resources.

In this work, we propose a new policy-based Single Sign-On service, i.e., a system that produces access tokens that are conditioned on the user's attributes fulfilling a specified policy. Our solution is based on multi-party computation and threshold cryptography, and generates access tokens of standardized format. The central idea is to distribute the role of the SSO provider among several entities, in order to shield user attributes and access patterns from each individual entity. We provide a formal security model and analysis in the Universal Composability framework, against proactive adversaries. Our implementation and benchmarking show the practicality of our system for many real-world use cases.

Digital Signatures are ubiquitous in modern computing. One of the most widely used digital signature schemes is ECDSA due to its use in TLS, various Blockchains such as Bitcoin and Etherum, and many other applications. Yet the formal analysis of ECDSA is comparatively sparse. In particular, all known security results for ECDSA rely on some idealized model such as the generic group model or the programmable (bijective) random oracle model.

In this work, we study the question whether these strong idealized models are necessary for proving the security of ECDSA. Specifically, we focus on the programmability of ECDSA's "conversion function" which maps an elliptic curve point into its $x$-coordinate modulo the group order. Unfortunately, our main results are negative. We establish, by means of a meta reductions, that an algebraic security reduction for ECDSA can only exist if the security reduction is allowed to program the conversion function. As a consequence, a meaningful security proof for ECDSA is unlikely to exist without strong idealization.

Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3 and the Signal protocol are very important and widely used security protocols. We show that the key update function in TLS 1.3 and the symmetric key ratchet in Signal can be modelled as non-additive synchronous stream ciphers. This means that the efficient Time Memory Tradeoff Attacks for stream ciphers can be applied. The implication is that TLS 1.3, QUIC, DTLS 1.3, and Signal offers a lower security level against TMTO attacks than expected from the key sizes. We provide detailed analyses of the key update mechanisms in TLS 1.3 and Signal, illustrate the importance of ephemeral key exchange, and show that the process that DTLS 1.3 and QUIC use to calculate AEAD limits is flawed. We provide many concrete recommendations for the analyzed protocols.

The SandboxAQ team is looking for a Standardization Engineer to help functionalize the next generation of cybersecurity systems. A successful candidate will represent SandboxAQ in cryptography and information security standard bodies, leading our global standardization activities. The candidate should have a proven track record of participation and contribution to standard bodies, and should be comfortable with cryptographic algorithms and secure protocols. The candidate will be part of a diverse team consisting of cryptographers, mathematicians, ML experts, and physicists, where they will play a key role in efficient and effective enablement of the technologies being developed.

Core Responsibilities

• Research and design new cryptographic primitives or protocols.
• Represent SandboxAQ’s interests in standard bodies.
• Contribute technically to the standardization of internal innovative designs and technologies.
• Work closely with the R&D, engineering teams and product manager teams, and help develop PoCs of the proposed standards.
• Help on organizing events related to standards or to research.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Carlos Aguilar-Melchor <carlos.aguilar@sandboxaq.com>
Martin Albrecht <martin.albrecht@sandboxaq.com>

More information: https://www.sandboxaq.com/careers-list?gh_jid=4884446004

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Lead Cryptography Software Engineer to lead the development of a composable cryptographic library implementing post quantum cryptography. As the Lead Cryptographer, you will be responsible for designing, developing, and implementing cryptographic protocols and algorithms that are resistant to quantum attacks. You will work closely with our team of software developers to ensure that the cryptographic library is robust, efficient, and easy to use.

Core Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and implement cryptographic protocols and algorithms that are resistant to quantum attacks.
• Lead the development of a disruptive composable cryptographic library that can be used in various applications and systems.
• Work closely with software developers and researchers to ensure that the cryptographic library is robust, efficient, and easy to use.
• Stay up-to-date with the latest developments in post quantum cryptography and integrate them into the library.
• Collaborate with other cryptographers and security experts to ensure that the library meets the highest security standards.
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior members of the team.
• Manage the Open Source version of the library including the publication pipeline (from the internal repository) as well as the resulting artifacts (e.g. Python/Rust/Go packages)

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Carlos Aguilar-Melchor <carlos.aguilar@sandboxaq.com>

More information: https://www.sandboxaq.com/careers-list?gh_jid=4872332004

The SandboxAQ team is looking for a software engineer to help functionalize the next generation of cryptographic systems. A successful candidate will be comfortable with user space Linux development, network engineering, cryptographic algorithms and secure protocols. They will be part of a diverse team consisting of cryptographers, mathematicians, ML experts, and physicists, where they will play a key role in efficient and effective enablement of the technologies being developed.

Core Responsibilities

• Participating in the development of our cryptographic framework:
  • Design and implement various API along the cryptographic stack (from block ciphers to creating VPN tunnels)
  • Support for new tunneling protocols
• Provide guidance on software development scope, capacity, prioritization and best practices
• Perform profiling, identify potential performance tradeoffs

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Carlos Aguilar-Melchor <carlos.aguilar@sandboxaq.com>

More information: https://www.sandboxaq.com/careers-list?gh_jid=4800134004