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19 December 2024
Arghya Bhattacharjee, Ritam Bhaumik, Nilanjan Datta, Avijit Dutta, Sougata Mandal
Marian Dietz, Hanjun Li, Huijia Lin
To strike a balance, we propose a novel concept: online-offline garbling. This approach leverages instance-independent and (partially) reusable preprocessing during an offline phase, to enable the creation of constant-size garbled circuits in an online phase, while maintaining practical efficiency. Specifically, during the offline stage, the garbler generates and transmits a reference string, independent of the computation to be performed later. Subsequently, in the online stage, the garbler efficiently transforms a circuit into a constant-size garbled circuit. The evaluation process relies on both the reference string and the garbled circuit.
We demonstrate that by leveraging existing tools such as those introduced by Applebaum et al. (Crypto’13) and Chongwon et al. (Crypto’17), online-offline garbling can be achieved under a variety of assumptions, including the hardness of Learning With Errors (LWE), Computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH), and factoring. In contrast, without the help of an offline phase, constant-size garbling is only feasible under the LWE and circular security assumptions, or the existence of indistinguishability obfuscation. However, these schemes are still very inefficient, several orders of magnitude more costly than Yao-style garbled circuits.
To address this, we propose a new online-offline garbling scheme based on Ring LWE. Our scheme offers both asymptotic and concrete efficiency. It serves as a practical alternative to Yao-style garbled circuits, especially in scenarios where online communication is constrained. Furthermore, we estimate the concrete latency using our approach in realistic settings and demonstrate that it is 2-20X faster than using Yao-style garbled circuits. This improvement is estimated without taking into account parallelization of computation, which can lead to further performance improvement using our scheme.
Cas Cremers, Alexander Dax, Aurora Naska
Ruize Wang, Joel Gärtner, Elena Dubrova
Jens Alich, Amund Askeland, Subhadeep Banik, Tim Beyne, Anne Canteaut, Patrick Felke, Gregor Leander, Willi Meier, Lukas Stennes
Xavier Bultel, Céline Chevalier, Charlène Jojon, Diandian Liu, Benjamin Nguyen
TU Wien, Vienna
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
-Privacy preserving cryptocurrencies
-Efficient proof systems such as (non-interactive) zero-knowledge, SNARKs, etc.
-Cryptographic protocols
-Functional encryption
-Fully homomorphic encryption
-Information-theoretic approaches such as differential privacy
Your profile:
-Completion of an excellent doctorate in Computer Science or a closely related field
-Strong background in cryptography, privacy-preserving mechanisms, or data security
-In-depth knowledge and experience in at least one subject area: secure computation, differential privacy, anonymous communication systems, privacy-preserving machine learning, cryptocurrencies, cryptographic protocols, identity management, homomorphic encryption, or zero-knowledge proofs
- An outstanding publication record in top conferences, e.g., CCS, Crypto, Eurocrypt, Usenix Security, NDSS, EEE S&P,...
Salary: Entry level salary is determined by the pay grade B1 of the Austrian collective agreement for university staff. This is a minimum of currently EUR 4,932.90/month gross, 14 times/year for 40 hours/week.
Deadline: January 9th, 2025.
Application only via: https://jobs.tuwien.ac.at/Job/245103
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Univ. Prof. Dr. Dominique Schröder
More information: https://jobs.tuwien.ac.at/Job/245103
The University of Klagenfurt (Austria)
Assistant Professor (postdoc), non-tenure track (limited to 6 years)
Responsibilities:
- Independent research with the aim of habilitation, with a specific emphasis on research in cybersecurity such as cryptography, side-channel analysis, efficient implementation, high-assurance software
- Independent delivery of courses using established and innovative methods (e.g. digital teaching)
- Participation in the research and teaching projects run by the organisational unit
- Supervision of students
- Participation in organisational and administrative tasks and in quality assurance measures
- Contribution to expanding the international scientific and cultural contacts of the organisational unit
- Participation in public relations activities
- Doctoral degree in computer science or a related field, completed at a domestic or foreign higher education institution.
- Strong background and practical experience in one or more of the following fields: cryptography, side-channel analysis, efficient implementation, high-assurance software
- Proven academic track record via accepted papers in a reputable cybersecurity venue or in venues (journals) of a comparable standing in the areas of cybersecurity
- Solid communication and dissemination skills
- Fluency in English (both written and spoken)
For more information and how to apply, please visit: https://jobs.aau.at/en/job/12-2/
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup (chitchanok.chuengsatiansup@aau.at)
More information: https://jobs.aau.at/en/job/12-2/
The University of Klagenfurt
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
- 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)
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/
University of Wollongong, Australia
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Applications (CV, transcripts, contacts for references) can be emailed to Dr Khoa Nguyen (khoa@uow.edu.au).
18 December 2024
Jaesang Noh, Dongwoo Han, Dong-Joon Shin
Yi-Fu Lai
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.
Shantanu Sharma, Yin Li, Sharad Mehrotra, Nisha Panwar, Komal Kumari, Swagnik Roychoudhury
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.
Markus de Medeiros, Muhammad Naveed, Tancrède Lepoint, Temesghen Kahsai, Tristan Ravitch, Stefan Zetzsche, Anjali Joshi, Joseph Tassarotti, Aws Albarghouthi, Jean-Baptiste Tristan
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.
Li Yu, Je Sen Teh
Thomas Attema, Michael Klooß, Russell W. F. Lai, Pavlo Yatsyna
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.
Enrico Bottazzi, Chan Nam Ngo, Masato Tsutsumi
Ittai Abraham, Gilad Asharov, Anirudh Chandramouli
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.
Ping Wang
17 December 2024
The Jacobi Factoring Circuit: Quantum Factoring with Near-Linear Gates and Sublinear Space and Depth
Gregory D. Kahanamoku-Meyer, Seyoon Ragavan, Vinod Vaikuntanathan, Katherine Van Kirk
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.