IACR News
Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:
24 August 2023
Johanna Loyer
David Chaum, Bernardo Cardoso, William Carter, Mario Yaksetig, Baltasar Aroso
Unlike traditional sampling approaches that select a subset of the network to run consensus on behalf of the network and disseminate the outcome, Phoenixx still requires participation of the whole network. The endorsers, however, assume a special role as they confirm that at least $2f+1$ validators are in agreement and issue a compressed certificate, attesting the network reached a decision. Phoenixx achieves linear communication complexity, while maintaining safety, liveness, and optimistic responsiveness, without using threshold signatures.
Diego F. Aranha, Benjamin Salling Hvass, Bas Spitters, Mehdi Tibouchi
21 August 2023
Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
The Cryptography and Privacy Engineering Group (ENCRYPTO) @CS Department @Technical University of Darmstadt offers a fully funded position as Doctoral Researcher (Research Assistant/PhD Student) in Cryptography and Privacy Engineering to be filled as soon as possible and initially for 3 years with the possibility of extension.
Job description:You'll work in the collaborative research center CROSSING funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). In our project E4 Compiler for Privacy-Preserving Protocols, we build compilers to automatically generate optimized MPC protocols for privacy-preserving applications. See https://encrypto.de/CROSSING for details. As PhD@ENCRYPTO, you primarily focus on your research aiming to publish&present the results at top venues.
We offer:We demonstrate that privacy is efficiently protectable in real-world applications via cryptographic protocols. Our open and international working environment facilitates excellent research in a sociable team. TU Darmstadt is a top research university for IT security, cryptography and CS in Europe. Darmstadt is a very international, livable and well-connected city in the Rhine-Main area around Frankfurt.
Your profile:- Completed Master's degree (or equivalent) at a top university with excellent grades in IT security, computer science, or a similar area.
- Extensive knowledge in applied cryptography/IT security and very good software development skills. Knowledge in cryptographic protocols (ideally MPC) is a plus.
- Experience and interest to engage in teaching.
- Self-motivated, reliable, creative, can work independently, and striving to do excellent research.
- Our working language is English: Able to discuss/write/present scientific results in English. German is beneficial but not required.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Thomas Schneider (application@encrypto.cs.tu-darmstadt.de)
More information: https://encrypto.de/2023-CROSSING
Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
The Cryptography and Privacy Engineering Group (ENCRYPTO) @Department of Computer Science @TU Darmstadt offers a fully funded position for a Postdoctoral Researcher, to be filled asap and initially til January 31, 2025 with the potential of extension.
Our mission is to demonstrate that privacy can be efficiently protected in real-world applications via cryptographic protocols.TU Darmstadt is located in the center of Germany and is a top research university for IT security, cryptography, and computer science. No German language skills are necessary and we established a hybrid working mode flexibly combining mobile work and in-presence time in office depending on individual preferences.
Job description:As postdoc @ENCRYPTO, your primary focus is on collaborations with our PhDs and external international collaborators for cutting-edge research in applied cryptography as well as the publication and presentation of the results at top-tier security and cryptography conferences/journals. In our ERC-funded project PSOTI, we develop protocols for privately processing data among untrusted service providers using MPC. Examples are privacy-preserving alternatives for common applications such as email, file sharing, and forms. Also, the active research field of PPML is of high relevance for our group.
Your profile- Completed PhD degree (or equivalent) at a top university in IT security, computer science, applied mathematics, electrical engineering, or a similar area
- Publications at top venues (CORE rank A*/A) for IT security/applied cryptography (e.g., EUROCRYPT, S&P, CCS, NDSS, USENIX SEC), ideally on cryptographic protocols and secure computation
- Experience in software development, project management and supervising students
- Self-motivated, reliable, creative, team-minded, and want to do excellent research on challenging scientific problems with practical relevance
- The working language at ENCRYPTO is English, so you must be able to discuss/write/present scientific results in English, whereas German is not required.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Thomas Schneider (application@encrypto.cs.tu-darmstadt.de)
More information: https://encrypto.de/POSTDOC
Research Institute CODE, Universität der Bundeswehr München, Germany
The Research Institute CODE (https://www.unibw.de/code), established in 2017, with currently 15 professorships and over 130 researchers, is being expanded to one of the largest European research institutes for cyber security.
For a newly established professorship in Cryptography, Daniel Slamanig is seeking multiple PhD and Post-Doc researchers. Relevant topics include:- Public-key cryptographic primitives
- Malleable and updatable cryptography
- Foundations and applications of privacy-preserving cryptography
- Post-quantum cryptography
- (Non-interactive) Zero-knowledge proofs and zk-SNARKs
- Real-world cryptography
Candidates are expected to do cutting edge research in cryptography. We offer the opportunity to engage with research projects and international partners from academia and industry. Candidates will also gain experience with supporting teaching activities.
Requirements:
- Master's degree (or equivalent) or PhD in Mathematics, Computer Science, Information Security, or a similar discipline.
- PostDoc candidates must have a strong track record (ideally with publications at IACR conferences and/or the top 4 security conferences) and good academic writing and presentation skills.
- High motivation for research work and ability to work independently.
- Good organisation and communication skills.
- Eager to disseminate research results through publications and presentations at top-tier conferences.
- Fluency in written and spoken English (German desirable but not required).
How to apply? Send a mail to Daniel Slamanig with subject line "Application UniBWM" including your cover/motivation letter, CV, transcripts of grades, and references.
Closing date for applications: Applications will be reviewed until the positions are filled.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Daniel Slamanig (daniel.slamanig [AT] gmail.com)
More information: https://danielslamanig.info/
National Sun Yat-sen University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering; Kaohsiung, Taiwan
Responsibilities: Apart from academic work, the student must involve in several activities in a group or individually, such as (not limited to):
Requirements: Apart from the university's basic admission policies (https://cse.nsysu.edu.tw/?Lang=en), students are desired to have the following key requirements:
Scholarship:
What students can expect:
What the supervisor can expect: Apart from academic and research works, students are expected to have
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Dr. Arijit Karati (arijit.karati@mail.cse.nsysu.edu.tw)
National Sun Yat-sen University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering; Kaohsiung, Taiwan
Essential Qualifications:
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Dr. Arijit Karati (arijit.karati@mail.cse.nsysu.edu.tw)
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
- Post-quantum cryptography (based on lattices and/or hash) and its applications
- Privacy-enhancing technologies (e.g. zero-knowledge proofs) and their applications
- highly competitive tuition fee and stipend scholarships
- opportunities to collaborate with leading academic and industry experts in the related areas
- opportunities to participate in international grant-funded projects
- collaborative and friendly research environment
- an opportunity to live/study in one of the most liveable and safest cities in the world
Requirements. A strong mathematical and cryptography background is required. Some knowledge/experience in coding (for example, Python, C/C++, SageMath) is a plus. Candidates must have completed (or be about to complete within the next 6 months) a significant research component either as part of their undergraduate (honours) degree or masters degree. They should have excellent English verbal and written communication skills.
How to apply. Please fill in the following form (also clickable from the advertisement title): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSetFZLvDNug5SzzE-iH97P9TGzFGkZB-ly_EBGOrAYe3zUYBw/viewform?usp=sf_link
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Ron Steinfeld
More information: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSetFZLvDNug5SzzE-iH97P9TGzFGkZB-ly_EBGOrAYe3zUYBw/viewform?usp=sf_link
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Rafael Dowsley Email: rafael.dowsley@monash.edu
Queen's University Belfast
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Arnab Kumar Biswas
More information: https://www.qub.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate-research/phd-opportunities/a-trusted-execution-environment-based-framework-for-securing-legacy-embedded-systems.html
Queen's University Belfast
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Arnab Kumar Biswas
More information: https://www.qub.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate-research/phd-opportunities/secure-multitenant-and-federated-satellite-system.html
Leuven, Belgium, 11 October - 13 October 2023
BITS Pilani Goa, India, 10 December - 13 December 2023
Submission deadline: 7 September 2023
Notification: 15 October 2023
Hongda Li, Peifang Ni, Yao Zan
Additionally, we obtain a witness encryption (WE) scheme for NP language based on the presented PKE scheme. This result highlights that WE scheme can also be established based on the existence of OWF.
Michael Brand, Tania Churchill, Carsten Friedrich
Tianyao Gu, Yilei Wang, Bingnan Chen, Afonso Tinoco, Elaine Shi, Ke Yi
Yibin Yang, David Heath, Carmit Hazay, Vladimir Kolesnikov, Muthuramakrishnan Venkitasubramaniam
Our main result, Batchman, is asymptotically and concretely efficient VOLE-based ZK for batched disjunctions, i.e. statements containing R repetitions of the same disjunction. This is crucial for, e.g., emulating CPU steps in ZK. Our prover and verifier complexity is only O(RB + R|C| + B|C|), where |C| is the maximum circuit size of the B branches. Prior works’ computation scales in RB|C|.
For non-batched disjunctions, we also construct a VOLE-based ZK protocol, Robin, which is (only) communication efficient. For small fields and for statistical security parameter λ, this protocol’s communication improves over the previous state of the art (Mac′n′Cheese, Baum et al., CRYPTO’21) by up to factor λ.
Our implementation outperforms prior state of the art. E.g., we achieve up to $6×$ improvement over Mac′n′Cheese (Boolean, single disjunction), and for arithmetic batched disjunctions our experiments show we improve over QuickSilver (Yang et al., CCS’21) by up to $70×$ and over AntMan (Weng et al., CCS’22) by up to $36×$.
Alexander R. Block, Albert Garreta, Pratyush Ranjan Tiwari, Michał Zając
Steve Thakur
The proof size is constant ($10$ $\mathbb{G}_1$, $20$ $\mathbb{F}_p$), as is the verification time, which is dominated by a single pairing check (i.e. two pairings). The Prover time is dominated by the $10$ multi-scalar multiplications in $\mathbb{G}_1$ - with a combined MSM length of $22\cdot |\mathrm{Circuit}|$- and, to a lesser extent, the computation of a single sum of polynomial products over the prime scalar field via multimodular FFTs.
The scheme supports succinct lookup arguments for subsets as well as subsequences. Our construction relies on homomorphic table commitments, which makes them amenable to vector lookups. The Prover algorithm runs in runtime $O(M\cdot \log(M))$, where $M = \max \{|\text{Circuit}| , \;|\text{Table}|\}.$
Furthermore, the scheme supports custom gates, albeit at the cost of a larger proof size. As an application of the techniques in this paper, we describe a protocol that supports multiple *univariate* custom gates $\mathcal{G}_i$ of high degree that are sparsely distributed in the sense that $$\sum_{i} \deg(\mathcal{G}_i)\cdot \#(\mathcal{G}_i\;\text{gates}) \; = \; O(|\text{Circuit}|). $$ This comes at the cost of three additional $\mathbb{G}_1$ elements and does not blow up the proof generation time, i.e. it does not entail MSMs or FFTs of length larger than the circuit size.