International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The University of Klagenfurt invites applications for PhD positions at the Digital Age Research Center and at the Department of Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity (Faculty of Technical Sciences).

Responsibilities:

• Autonomous scientific work including the publication of research articles in the field of cybersecurity, with a specific emphasis on cryptography, side-channel analysis, efficient implementation, high-assurance software and related areas
• Independent teaching and assessment
• Contribution to organisational and administrative tasks
• Participation in public relations activities

Requirements:

• Master’s degree at a domestic or foreign higher education institution in computer science or a related field
• Strong background and practical experience in one or more of the following fields: cryptography, side-channel analysis, efficient implementation, high-assurance software
• Solid communication and dissemination skills
• Fluency in English (both written and spoken)

Application deadline: 29th January 2025

For more information and how to apply, please visit: https://jobs.aau.at/job/university-assistant-predoctoral-all-genders-welcome-13/

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup (chitchanok.chuengsatiansup@aau.at)

More information: https://jobs.aau.at/job/university-assistant-predoctoral-all-genders-welcome-13/

The Institute of Cybersecurity and Cryptology at the University of Wollongong (Australia) is recruiting two PhD students to carry out cutting-edge research in privacy-preserving post-quantum cryptography. The positions are fully funded for up to 4 years. Applicants are expected to have a strong background in computer science, cryptography and mathematics, as well as proficiency in English. Applications will be processed continuously until the positions are filled.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Applications (CV, transcripts, contacts for references) can be emailed to Dr Khoa Nguyen (khoa@uow.edu.au).

The Gentry-Peikert-Vaikuntanathan (GPV) framework is utilized for constructing digital signatures, which is proven to be secure in the classical/quantum random-oracle model. Falcon is such a signature scheme, recognized as a compact and efficient signature among NIST-standardized signature schemes. Although a signature scheme based on the GPV framework is theoretically highly secure, it could be vulnerable to side-channel attacks and hence further research on physical attacks is required to make a robust signature scheme. We propose a general secret key recovery attack on GPV signatures using partial information about signatures obtained from side-channel attack. The three main contributions are summarized as follows. First, we introduce, for the first time, a concept of vulnerable partial information of GPV signatures and propose a secret key recovery attack, called OLS attack, which effectively utilizes partial information. In contrast to the approaches of Guerreau et al. (CHES 2022) and Zhang et al. (Eurocrypt 2023), which utilize filtered (or processed) signatures with hidden parallelepiped or learning slice schemes, the OLS attack leverages all the available signatures without filtering. We prove that the secret key recovered by the OLS attack converges to the real secret key in probability as the number of samples increases. Second, we utilize Gaussian leakage as partial information for the OLS attack on Falcon. As a result, the OLS attack shows a significantly higher success rate with fewer samples than the existing attack schemes. Furthermore, by incorporating the DDGR attack, the OLS attack can recover the secret key using much less samples with a success rate close to 100%. Moreover, we propose more efficient OLS attack on Falcon, which reduces the number of required side-channel attacks. Third, we propose an error-tolerant power analysis attack using MAP decoding, which effectively corrects the errors in samples to utilize Gaussian leakage correctly. In conclusion, the OLS attack is expected to strengthen the security of the GPV signatures including Falcon.

In PKC'24, de Saint Guilhem and Pedersen give a pseudorandom function basing on a relaxed group action assumption in the semi-honest setting. Basing on the assumption, they build an oblivious pseudorandom function (OPRF). Later, a recent paper by Levin and Pedersen uses the same function to build a verifiable random function (VRF), using the same assumption.

We give a structural attack on this problem by reducing it to a few group action inverse problems (GAIP/DLog) over small subgroups. This reduction allows us to apply a CRT-based attack to recover the secret key, ultimately lowering the problem’s effective security strength to under 70 classical bits when using CSIDH-512. Hence the strength of their pseudorandom functions is bounded above by the GAIP over the largest prime order subgroup. Clearly, Kuperberg’s subexponential attack can be used to further reduce its quantum security.

Information-theoretic or unconditional security provides the highest level of security --- independent of the computational capability of an adversary. Secret-sharing techniques achieve information-theoretic security by splitting a secret into multiple parts (called shares) and storing the shares across non-colluding servers. However, secret-sharing-based solutions suffer from high overheads due to multiple communication rounds among servers and/or information leakage due to access-patterns (i.e.., the identity of rows satisfying a query) and volume (i.e., the number of rows satisfying a query).

We propose SeaSearch, an information-theoretically secure approach that uses both additive and multiplicative secret-sharing, to efficiently support a large class of selection queries involving conjunctive, disjunctive, and range conditions. Two major contributions of SeaSearch are: (i) a new search algorithm using additive shares based on fingerprints, which were developed for string-matching over cleartext; and (ii) two row retrieval algorithms: one is based on multiplicative shares and another is based on additive shares. SeaSearch does not require communication among servers storing shares and does not reveal any information to an adversary based on access-patterns and volume.

Differential privacy (DP) has become the gold standard for privacy-preserving data analysis, but implementing it correctly has proven challenging. Prior work has focused on verifying DP at a high level, assuming the foundations are correct and a perfect source of randomness is available. However, the underlying theory of differential privacy can be very complex and subtle. Flaws in basic mechanisms and random number generation have been a critical source of vulnerabilities in real-world DP systems.

In this paper, we present SampCert, the first comprehensive, mechanized foundation for differential privacy. SampCert is written in Lean with over 12,000 lines of proof. It offers a generic and extensible notion of DP, a framework for constructing and composing DP mechanisms, and formally verified implementations of Laplace and Gaussian sampling algorithms. SampCert provides (1) a mechanized foundation for developing the next generation of differentially private algorithms, and (2) mechanically verified primitives that can be deployed in production systems. Indeed, SampCert’s verified algorithms power the DP offerings of Amazon Web Services (AWS), demonstrating its real-world impact.

SampCert’s key innovations include: (1) A generic DP foundation that can be instantiated for various DP definitions (e.g., pure, concentrated, Rényi DP); (2) formally verified discrete Laplace and Gaussian sampling algorithms that avoid the pitfalls of floating-point implementations; and (3) a simple probability monad and novel proof techniques that streamline the formalization. To enable proving complex correctness properties of DP and random number generation, SampCert makes heavy use of Lean’s extensive Mathlib library, leveraging theorems in Fourier analysis, measure and probability theory, number theory, and topology.

In this paper, we investigate the security of lightweight block ciphers, focusing on those that utilize the ADD-Rotate-XOR (ARX) and AND-Rotate-XOR (AND-RX) design paradigms. More specifically, we examine their resilience against boomerang-style attacks. First, we propose an automated search strategy that leverages the boomerang connectivity table (BCT) for AND operations ($\wedge BCT$) to conduct a complete search for boomerang and rectangle distinguishers for AND-RX ciphers. The proposed search strategy automatically considers all possible $\wedge BCT$ switches in the middle of the boomerang to optimise distinguishing probability. The correctness of the search strategy was verified experimentally. We were able to find the best boomerang and rectangle distinguishers to date in the single-key model for lightweight block ciphers KATAN32/48/64} and SIMON32/48. Next, we investigated BCT properties of ARX ciphers and discovered that a truncated boomerang switch could be formulated for the lightweight ARX cipher, CHAM. We were able to find the best single-key and related-key rectangle distinguishers to date for Cham. Our findings provide more accurate security margins of these lightweight ciphers against boomerang-style attacks.

Proving knowledge soundness of an interactive proof from scratch is often a challenging task. This has motivated the evelopment of various special soundness frameworks which, in a nutshell, separate knowledge extractors into two parts: (1) an extractor to produce a set of accepting transcripts conforming to some structure; (2) a witness recovery algorithm to recover a witness from a set of transcripts with said structure. These frameworks take care of (1), so it suffices for a protocol designer to specify (2) which is often simple(r).

Recently, works by Bünz–Fisch (TCC’23) and Aardal et al. (CRYPTO’24) provide new frameworks, called almost special soundness and predicate special soundness, respectively. To handle insufficiencies of special soundness, they deviate from its spirit and augment it in different ways. The necessity for their changes is that special soundness does not allow the challenges for useful sets of transcripts to depend on the transcripts themselves, but only on the challenges in the transcripts. As a consequence, (generalised) special soundness cannot express extraction strategies which reduce a computational problem to finding “inconsistent” accepting transcripts, for example in PCP/IOP-based or lattice-based proof systems, and thus provide (very) sub-optimal extractors. In this work, we introduce adaptive special soundness which captures extraction strategies exploiting inconsistencies between transcripts, e.g. transcripts containing different openings of the same commitment. Unlike (generalised) special soundness (Attema, Fehr, and Resch (TCC’23)), which specifies a target transcript structure, our framework allows specifying an extraction strategy which guides the extractor to sample challenges adaptively based on the history of prior transcripts. We extend the recent (almost optional) extractor of Attema, Fehr, Klooß and Resch (EPRINT 2023/1945) to our notion, and argue that it encompasses almost special soundness and predicate special soundness in many cases of interest.

As a challenging application, we modularise and generalise the lattice Bulletproofs analysis by Bünz–Fisch (TCC’23) using the adaptive special soundness framework. Moreover, we extend their analysis to the ring setting for a slightly wider selection of rings than rational integers.

Multilateral Trade Credit Set-off (MTCS) is a process run by a service provider that collects trade credit data (i.e. obligations from a firm to pay another firm) from a network of firms and detects cycles of debts that can be removed from the system. The process yields liquidity savings for the participants, who can discharge their debts without relying on expensive loans. We propose an MTCS protocol that protects firms' sensitive data, such as the obligation amount or the identity of the firms they trade with. Mathematically, this is analogous to solving the Minimum Cost Flow (MCF) problem over a graph of $n$ firms, where the $m$ edges are the obligations. State-of-the-art techniques for Secure MCF have an overall complexity of $O(n^{10} \log n)$ communication rounds, making it barely applicable even to small-scale instances. Our solution leverages novel secure techniques such as Graph Anonymization and Network Simplex to reduce the complexity of the MCF problem to $O(max(n, \log\log{n+m}))$ rounds of interaction per pivot operations in which $O(max(n^2, nm))$ comparisons and multiplications are performed. Experimental results show the tradeoff between privacy and optimality.

The COOL protocol of Chen (DISC'21) is a major advance that enables perfect security for various tasks (in particular, Byzantine Agreement in Synchrony and Reliable Broadcast in Asynchrony). For an input of size $L$ bits, its communication complexity is $O(nL+n^2 \log n)$, which is optimal up to a $\log n$ factor. Unfortunately, Chen’s analysis is rather intricate and complex.

Our main contribution is a simple analysis of a new variant of COOL based on elementary counting arguments. Our main consistency proof takes less than two pages (instead of over 20 pages), making the COOL protocol much more accessible. In addition, the simple analysis allows us to improve the protocol by reducing one round of communication and reducing the communication complexity by 40%.

In addition, we suggest a new way of extracting the core properties of COOL as a new primitive, which we call Graded Dispersal. We show how Graded Dispersal can then be used to obtain efficient solutions for Byzantine Agreement, Verifiable Information Dispersal, Gradecast, and Reliable Broadcast (in both Synchrony and Asynchrony, where appropriate). Our improvement of COOL directly applies here, and we improve the state-of-the-art in all those primitives by reducing at least one round and 40% communication.

The question of whether the complexity class P equals NP is a major unsolved problem in theoretical computer science. In this paper, we introduce a new language, the Add and XNOR (the negation of exclusive or (XOR)) problem, which has the simplest structure and perfect randomness, by extending the subset sum problem. We prove that P $\neq$ NP as it shows that an exhaustive search is necessary to solve the Add and XNOR problem. That is, problems that are verifiable in polynomial time are not necessarily solvable in polynomial time.

We present a compact quantum circuit for factoring a large class of integers, including some whose classical hardness is expected to be equivalent to RSA (but not including RSA integers themselves). To our knowledge, it is the first polynomial-time circuit to achieve sublinear qubit count for a classically-hard factoring problem; the circuit also achieves sublinear depth and nearly linear gate count. We build on the quantum algorithm for squarefree decomposition discovered by Li, Peng, Du and Suter (Nature Scientific Reports 2012), which relies on computing the Jacobi symbol in quantum superposition. Our circuit completely factors any number $N$, whose prime decomposition has distinct exponents, and finds at least one non-trivial factor if not all exponents are the same. In particular, to factor an $n$-bit integer $N=P^2 Q$ (with $P$ and $Q$ prime, and $Q<2^m$ for some $m$), our circuit uses $\widetilde{O}(m)$ qubits and has depth at most $\widetilde{O}(m + n/m)$, with $\widetilde{O}(n)$ quantum gates. When $m=\Theta(n^a)$ with $2/3 < a < 1$, the space and depth are sublinear in $n$, yet no known classical algorithms exploit the relatively small size of $Q$ to run faster than general-purpose factoring algorithms. We thus believe that factoring such numbers has potential to be the most concretely efficient classically-verifiable proof of quantumness currently known.

The technical core of our contribution is a new space-efficient quantum algorithm to compute the Jacobi symbol of $A$ mod $B$, in the regime where $B$ is classical and much larger than $A$. Crucially, our circuit reads the bits of the classical value $B$ in a streaming fashion, never storing more than $\widetilde{O}(\log A)$ qubits of quantum information at one time. In the context of the larger Jacobi algorithm for factoring $N = P^2Q$, this reduces the overall qubit count to be roughly proportional to the length of $Q$, rather than the length of $N$. Our circuit for computing the Jacobi symbol is also highly gate-efficient and parallelizable, achieving gate count $\widetilde{O}(\log B)$ and depth at most $\widetilde{O}(\log A + \log B/\log A)$. Finally, we note that our circuit for computing the Jacobi symbol generalizes to related problems, such as computing the greatest common divisor, and thus could be of independent interest.

We introduce a new approach between classical security proofs of modes of operation and dedicated security analysis for known cryptanalysis families: General Practical Cryptanalysis. This allows us to analyze generically the security of the sum of two keyed permutations against known attacks. In many cases (of course, not all), we show that the security of the sum is strongly linked to that of the composition of the two permutations. This enables the construction of beyond-birthday bound secure low-latency PRFs by cutting a known-to-be-secure block cipher into two equal parts. As a side result, our general analysis shows an inevitable difficulty for the key recovery based on differential-type attacks against the sum, which leads to a correction of previously published attacks on the dedicated design Orthros.

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) enables secure computation of functions on ciphertexts without requiring decryption. Specifically, AP-like HE schemes exploit an intrinsic bootstrapping method called blind rotation. In blind rotation, a look-up table is homomorphically evaluated on the input ciphertext through the iterative multiplication of monomials. However, the algebraic structure of the multiplicative group of monomials imposes certain limitations on the input and output plaintext space: 1. only a fraction of the input plaintext space can be bootstrapped, 2. the output plaintext space is restricted to subsets of real numbers.

In this paper, we design a novel bootstrapping method called slot blind rotation. The key idea of our approach is to utilize the automorphism group instead of monomials. More specifically, the look-up table is encoded into a single polynomial using SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) packing and is rotated via a series of homomorphic multiplications and automorphisms. This method achieves two significant advantages: 1. the entire input plaintext space can be bootstrapped, 2. a more broad output plaintext space, such as complex numbers or finite field/rings can be supported.

Finally, we present a new HE scheme leveraging the slot blind rotation technique and provide a proof-of-concept implementation. We also demonstrate the the benchmark results and provide recommended parameter sets.

This article presents a cryptanalysis of a 19th-century encrypted manuscript discovered in the archives of Conde de Siete Fuentes in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. The manuscript, preserved by the heirs of the 6th Count of Valle de Salazar, utilizes a polyalphabetic substitution cipher. The cryptanalysis was performed by applying statistical frequency analysis and developing a Python script for decryption, resulting in the authors successfully deciphering the message. The decrypted letter reveals political communications discussing the strategic positioning of Tenerife as the capital, the dissolution of local councils, and the influence of key political figures. The analysis compares the cipher with historical encryption techniques, and identifies the unique characteristics of the manuscript’s encryption method. The study highlights the political dynamics and alliances within Tenerife’s nobility and their interactions with the central Spanish government, providing significant insights into, both, the cryptographic practices and political maneuvers of the time.

Event date: 7 July to 12 July 2025
Submission deadline: 24 February 2024
Notification: 6 May 2025

Event date: 7 July to 12 July 2025
Submission deadline: 24 February 2025
Notification: 6 May 2025

Event date: 26 May to 28 May 2025
Submission deadline: 26 January 2025
Notification: 24 February 2025

Event date: 31 March to 2 April 2025
Submission deadline: 30 November 2024
Notification: 20 January 2025

Department of Mathematics and Computer Science - Institute of Computer Science 2 Positions for Research Associates (m/f/d) with 100% full-time employment limited until 31.07.2027 Salary Group 13 TV-L FU Reference: WiMi EASEPROFIT Responsibilities: Collaboration in the EASEPROFIT joint project with academic and industry partners from the financial sector. The work involves the development of innovative post-quantum cryptography and security protocols for the "typical" financial transactions between banks and customers over the internet. Further information can be found at http://www.mi.fu-berlin.de/en/inf/groups/ag-comm/index.html. Requirements: Applicants must have completed a scientific degree (Master’s or equivalent) in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related field. The position can be designed as either a PhD position or a postdoctoral position (for candidates with an existing doctorate). (Professional) Experience: Knowledge of mathematical cryptography and experience with security protocols are required. Additional knowledge in post-quantum cryptography or cryptographic protocols in the financial sector is an advantage.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Please send your application until 31.12.2024 with relevant documents in PDF format (preferably as a single file) electronically by email, including the reference number, to g.wunder@fu-berlin.de (cc: stefanie.bahe@fu-berlin.de).

More information: https://www.fu-berlin.de/universitaet/beruf-karriere/jobs/wiss/19_fb-mathematik-und-informatik/MI-WiMi-EASEPROFIT.html