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07 November 2023
Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
The newly stablished Implementation Security group is one of the core groups forming the faculty of Computer Science in the Technische Universität Darmstadt and National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity (ATHENE). The research focus of the group 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. This includes various implementation platforms like ASICs, FPGAs, and micro-processors.
The group is looking for excellent B.Sc. and M.Sc. graduates with outstanding grades and degrees in computer science, 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 a 2-year contract. 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
Are you interested? Please send your complete application documents in one single pdf file to: amir.moradi@tu-darmstadt.de. The required documents are: Curriculum Vitae, transcript of records of BSc., transcript of records of MSc. (if applicable), two reference names (supervisors or other researchers with whom you worked).
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Amir Moradi: (amir.moradi@tu-darmstadt.de)
University of St.Gallen, Switzerland
The student is expected to work on topics that include security and privacy issues in authentication. More precisely, the student will be working on investigating efficient and privacy-preserving authentication that provides: i) provable security guarantees, and ii) rigorous privacy guarantees.
Key Responsibilities:
- Perform exciting and challenging research in the domain of information security and cryptography.
- Support and assist in teaching computer security and cryptography courses.
- The PhD student is expected to have a MSc degree or equivalent, and strong background in cryptography, network security and mathematics.
- Experience in one or more domains such as cryptography, design of protocols, secure multi-party computation and differential privacy is beneficial.
- Excellent programming skills.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English
The starting date for the position is flexible and come with a very competitive salary. The selection process runs until the suitable candidate has been found.
Please apply by 20th November 2023 through the job portal (via link).
Closing date for applications:
Contact:
Please, all applications through the job portal (via link).
Eriane Breu (Administrative matters)
Prof. Katerina Mitrokotsa (Research related questions)
More information: https://jobs.unisg.ch/offene-stellen/funded-phd-student-in-applied-cryptography-privacy-preserving-authentication-m-f-d-m-w-d/6ce1d454-47ca-4710-a9f2-33429243b4ac
University of St.Gallen, Switzerland
Our research interests are centered around information security and applied cryptography, with the larger goal of safeguarding communications and providing strong privacy guarantees. We are active in several areas, a subset of which include:
- Verifiable computation
- Secure, private and distributed aggregation
- Secure multi-party computation
- Privacy-preserving biometric authentication
- Anonymous credentials
- Distributed and privacy-preserving authentication
The starting date for the position is flexible and come with a very competitive salary. The selection process runs until the suitable candidate has been found. The University of St.Gallen conducts excellent research with international implications. The city of St.Gallen is located one hour from Zurich and offers a high quality of life.
Please apply by 20th November 2023 through the job portal (via link).
Closing date for applications:
Contact:
Please, all applications through the job portal (via link).
Eriane Breu (Administrative matters)
Prof. Katerina Mitrokotsa (Research related questions)
More information: https://jobs.unisg.ch/offene-stellen/postdoc-fellow-in-cryptography-information-security-m-f-d-m-w-d/831c6e8a-e191-48ec-92d5-320b2822a9ab
06 November 2023
Alessandro Chiesa, Ziyi Guan, Burcu Yıldız
We show that, perhaps surprisingly, parallel repetition of a PCP can increase soundness error, in fact bringing the soundness error to one as the number of repetitions tends to infinity. This "failure" of parallel repetition is common: we find that it occurs for a wide class of natural PCPs for NP-complete languages. We explain this unexpected phenomenon by providing a characterization result: the parallel repetition of a PCP brings the soundness error to zero if and only if a certain "MIP projection" of the PCP has soundness error strictly less than one. We show that our characterization is tight via a suitable example. Moreover, for those cases where parallel repetition of a PCP does bring the soundness error to zero, the aforementioned connection to MIPs offers preliminary results on the rate of decay of the soundness error.
Finally, we propose a simple variant of parallel repetition, called consistent parallel repetition (CPR), which has the same randomness complexity and query complexity as the plain variant of parallel repetition. We show that CPR brings the soundness error to zero for every PCP (with non-trivial soundness error). In fact, we show that CPR decreases the soundness error at an exponential rate in the repetition parameter.
Santiago Arranz Olmos, Gilles Barthe, Ruben Gonzalez, Benjamin Grégoire, Vincent Laporte, Jean-Christophe Lechenet, Tiago Oliveira, Peter Schwabe
Feng Li, Jianfeng Ma, Yinbin Miao, Pengfei Wu, Xiangfu Song
Keegan Ryan, Kaiwen He, George Arnold Sullivan, Nadia Heninger
Mingjie Chen, Yi-Fu Lai, Abel Laval, Laurane Marco, Christophe Petit
Zhiwei Li, Jun Xu, Lei Hu
Jan Schoone, Joan Daemen
Ivan Buchinskiy, Matvei Kotov, Alexander Treier
Yang Tan, Bo Lv
In this paper, we manage to break two PSI-CA protocols by recovering the specific intersection items in polynomial time. Among them, the PSI-CA protocol proposed by De Cristofaro et al. in 2012 is the most popular PSI-CA protocol based on the Google Scholar search results and it is still deemed one of the most efficient PSI-CA protocols.
In this paper, we also propose several solutions to these protocols' security problems.
Hadas Zeilberger, Binyi Chen, Ben Fisch
This work introduces Basefold, a generalization of the FRI IOPP to a broad class of linear codes beyond Reed-Solomon, which we call $\textit{foldable linear codes}$. We construct a new family of foldable linear codes, which are a special type of randomly punctured Reed-Muller code, and prove tight bounds on their minimum distance. Finally, we introduce a new construction of a multilinear PCS from any foldable linear code, which is based on interleaving Basefold with the classical sumcheck protocol for multilinear polynomial evaluation. As a special case, this gives a new multilinear PCS from FRI.
In addition to these theoretical contributions, the Basefold PCS instantiated with our new foldable linear codes offers a more reasonable tradeoff between prover time, proof size, and verifier time than prior constructions. For instance, for polynomials over a $64$-bit field with $12$ variables, the Basefold prover is faster than both Brakedown and FRI-PCS ($2$ times faster than Brakedown and $3$ times faster than FRI-PCS), and its proof is $4$ times smaller than Brakedown's. On the other hand, for polynomials with $25$ variables, Basefold's prover is $6.5$ times faster than FRI-PCS, it's proof is $2.5$ times smaller than Brakedown's and its verifier is $7.5$ times faster. Using Basefold to compile the Hyperplonk PIOP [CBBZ23] results in an extremely fast implementation of Hyperplonk, which in addition to having competitive performance on general circuits, is particularly fast for circuits with high-degree custom gates (e.g., signature verification and table lookups). Hyperplonk with Basefold is approximately equivalent to the speed of Hyperplonk with Brakedown, but with a proof size that is more than $5$ times smaller. Finally, Basefold maintains performance across a wider variety of field choices than FRI, which requires FFT-friendly fields. Thus, Basefold can have an extremely fast prover compared to SNARKs from FRI for special applications. Benchmarking a circom ECDSA verification circuit with curve secp256k1, Hyperplonk with Basefold has a prover time that is more than $200\times$ faster than with FRI and its proof size is $5.8$ times smaller than Hyperplonk with Brakedown.
03 November 2023
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 5 March - 8 March 2024
Submission deadline: 15 November 2023
Notification: 22 December 2023
Willemstad, Netherlands, 8 March 2024
Submission deadline: 15 December 2023
Notification: 12 January 2024
Queen's University Belfast
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Arnab Kumar Biswas
More information: https://www.qub.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate-research/phd-opportunities/remote-healthcare-security.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-satellite-constellation-system.html
CWI Cryptology Group
We invite candidates with a strong (published) research record in (applied or theoreretical) cryptology and with a PhD in mathematics or computer science to apply. All areas of research covered by the Group are eligible.
The senior research staff of the CWI Cryptology Group consists of Ronald Cramer (head), Leo Ducas, Serge Fehr, Lisa Kohl, Marc Stevens, and Thomas Attema (part-time).
Each position is with a flexible starting date, available as of immediately. Applications will be reviewed continuously until the positions are filled.
All applications should include a motivation letter, a detailed resume (including a list of publications), a research statement (max 2 pages) discussing prior, current and future research, and the names of at least three references.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Ronald Cramer (cramer@cwi.nl, cramer@math.leidenuniv.nl)