International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Event date: 5 February to 15 March 2025

Event date: to
Submission deadline: 15 March 2025

Event date: to
Submission deadline: 15 March 2025

Dear IACR members,

Nominations for the 2025 Test-of-Time award (for papers published in 2010) will be accepted until Feb 28, 2025.

Details for the nomination process can be found here: https://www.iacr.org/testoftime/nomination.html

Event date: 3 May 2025
Submission deadline: 20 February 2025
Notification: 7 March 2025

We are looking for a PhD student to join the Crypto Team and Security Group at Chalmers with Christoph Egger as main supervisor. The position is fully funded for 5 years and comes with 20% teaching duties in the department. The Crypto Team currently has 2 faculty members and 4 PhD students and is embedded in the security group that captures a wide range of topics.

Depending on the interests of the applicant, possible research topics include fine-grained and bounded space cryptography, realization of idealized models, relationship between cryptographic notions, and similar topics in foundational cryptography. Exploring connections to statistical security notions and formal methods is possible. One or two extended research visits are encouraged during the doctoral study.

Applicants should have a strong interest in the mathematical analysis of algorithms in general and cryptography in particular. A master's degree in mathematics, computer science, or a related discipline is required. The working language in the department is English, and applicants are expected to be fluent both in written and spoken English. Swedish courses are available for interested students.

• In Bounded Space Cryptography we are working with adversaries that are not restricted in their runtime but have limited memory and are trying to achieve basic cryptographic tasks that are secure against such adversaries.
• Idealized Models are simplifications made in proofs for real-world cryptographic protocols. We often know that this is an oversimplification in general and can hide attacks. We are interested in studying under which circumstances the simplifications can be justified.
• Cryptography relies on unproven assumptions like the hardness of factoring. Studying Relations between Cryptographic Notions asks the question of the type "If I can build public key encryption, can I also always have signature schemes?" and proves whether such statements are true or false.

  Closing date for applications:

  Contact: Christoph Egger, christoph.egger@chalmers.se

  More information: https://www.chalmers.se/en/about-chalmers/work-with-us/vacancies/?rmpage=job&rmjob=p13670

Nomos is a new blockchain designed from the ground up with the original cypherpunk ethos: decentralization, censorship resistance, permissionless-ness and privacy. It will serve as the trustless agreements layer of the Logos stack. The forthcoming Nomos network will provide a common infrastructure layer upon which communities and aspiring network states can build social, governance, and financial services that uphold their community members’ fundamental rights and values.

Key Responsibilities

Develop and analyze advanced algorithms for complex systems, focusing on privacy, efficiency and scalability.

Understand engineering requirements and translate them into mathematical models for their analysis.

Formalize and prove properties of protocols and algorithms currently in development by our team.

Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, translating theoretical constructs into commercially viable solutions.

Lead the applied research efforts, bridging academic rigor with practical, industry-focused outcomes.

Ideally, you will have

Strong background in computer science or applied mathematics: advanced analysis of algorithms, complex systems and/or stochastic processes.

Proven track record of using advanced mathematical tools to tackle real-world problems.

Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to convey complex ideas clearly both in written and verbal form.

Experience with or strong interest in blockchain, cryptography, distributed systems or networks.

Bonus points

Exposure to blockchain concepts or decentralized technologies.

Familiarity with cryptography and open-source contributions.

Familiarity with differential privacy analysis.

Advanced degree (PhD or MsC with significant research experience) in Mathematics, Theoretical Computer Science, or a related field—paired with commercial experience

Closing date for applications:

Contact: angel@status.im

More information: https://boards.greenhouse.io/logos/jobs/6526845

Side-channel attacks (SCAs) pose a significant threat to the implementations of lightweight ciphers, particularly in resource-constrained environments where masking—the primary countermeasure—is constrained by tight resource limitations. This makes it crucial to reduce the resource and randomness requirements of masking schemes. In this work, we investigate an approach to minimize the randomness complexity of masking algorithms. Specifically, we explore the theoretical foundations of deterministic higher-order masking, which relies solely on offline randomness present in the initial input shares and eliminates the need for online (fresh) randomness during internal computations. We demonstrate the feasibility of deterministic masking for ciphers such as Ascon, showing that their diffusion layer can act as a refresh subcircuit. This ensures that, up to a threshold number, probes placed in different rounds remain independent. Based on this observation, we propose composition theorems for deterministic masking schemes. On the practical side, we extend the proof of first- and second-order probing security for Ascon’s protected permutation from a single round to an arbitrary number of rounds

SIMON is a lightweight block cipher proposed by the National Security Agency. According to previous cryptanalytic results on SIMON, differential and linear cryptanalysis are the two most effective attacks on it. Usually, there are many trails sharing the same input and output differences (resp. masks). These trails comprise the differential (resp. linear hull) and can be used together when mounting attacks. In ASIACRYPT 2021, Leurent et al. proposed a matrix-based method on SIMON-like ciphers, where only trails whose active bits stay in a $w$-bit window are considered. The static window in each round is chosen to be $w$ least significant bits. They applied this efficient framework on SIMON and SIMECK, and have obtained many better differentials and linear hulls than before. For SIMON, they also found that there seems to be some potential for improvement, which should be further investigated.

In this paper, we dynamically choose window for each round to achieve better distinguishers. Benefiting from these dynamic windows, we can obtain stronger differentials and linear hulls than previously proposed for almost all versions of SIMON. Finally, we provided the best differential/linear attacks on SIMON48, SIMON64, and SIMON96 in terms of round number, complexity, or success rate.

Lund et al. (JACM 1992) invented the powerful Sumcheck protocol that has been extensively used in complexity theory and also for designing concretely efficient (zero-knowledge) arguments. In this work, we systematically study Sumcheck in the context of secure multi-party computation (MPC). Our main result is a new generic framework for lifting semi-honest MPC protocols to malicious security, with a {\em constant} multiplicative overhead in {\em both} computation and communication, and even additional logarithmic communication in the best case. In general, our approach applies to any semi-honest linear secret-sharing based MPC secure up to additive attacks, where secret-sharings can be added with an authentication property. At a high-level, our approach has a highly distributive flavor, where the parties jointly emulate a Sumcheck prover that proves the correctness of MPC semi-honest evaluations in zero-knowledge, meanwhile they also jointly emulate a Sumcheck verifier and verify the proof themselves. Along the way, we provide a new angle of view on the {\em fully linear interactive oracle proof} (FLIOP) systems proposed by Boneh et al. (CRYPTO 2019). That is, essentially distributed sumcheck on proving a batch of multiplications is an optimized concrete instantiation of the FLIOP-based approach.

As concrete applications of our techniques, we first consider semi-honest MPC protocols based on Shamir secret-sharing with an honest majority. Suppose $M$-party and circuit size $N$, to achieve malicious security, our approach only introduces additional $10MN+O(M\log{N})$ total computation, communication of reconstructions of $4\log{N}+6$ secret-shared values, $O(\log{N})$ rounds and $O(\log{N})$ correlated randomness. This shows that malicious security with abort in honest majority MPC comes {\em free} in terms of both computation and communication.

We then consider dishonest majority MPC, where the best known semi-honest protocol achieves $2N$ online communication per party and sublinear preprocessing by using programmable pseudorandom correlation generators (PCGs). We realize malicious MPC with $4N+O(\log{N})$ online communication as well as sublinear preprocessing, matching the optimal $2\times$ communication overhead in Hazay et al. (JOC 2024). Our protocol is essentially obtained by using Sumcheck techniques to check authenticated multiplication triple relations, which requires only $N+1$ {\em standard Beaver triples} and $O(\log{N})$ random authenticated shares for $N$ semi-honestly generated authenticated triples. Compared to the FLIOP-based checking mechanism (Boyle et al. CRYPTO 2022) that requires $O(\sqrt{N})$ communication and $O(N^{1.5})$ computation, we do not introduce any cryptographic assumption beyond PCGs, and have $O(N)$ computation.

Cross-chain bridges, realizing the transfer of information and assets between blockchains, form the core of blockchain interoperability solutions. Most existing bridge networks are modeled in an honest-malicious setting, where the bridge nodes are either honest or malicious. Rationality allows the nodes to deviate from the protocol arbitrarily for an economic incentive. In this work, we present HyperLoop, an efficient cross-chain multi-signature bridge and prove that it is safe and live game-theoretically, under the more realistic rational-malicious model.

As rational bridge nodes are allowed to deviate from the protocol and even collude, a monitor mechanism is necessitated, which we realize by introducing whistle-blower nodes. These whistle-blowers constantly check the operations of the bridge and raise complaints to a complaint resolution network in case of discrepancies. To enforce punishments, it is necessary for the nodes to stake an amount before participating as bridge nodes. Consequently, a cap on the volume of funds transferred over the bridge is established. We describe a sliding window mechanism and establish a relation between the stake and the sliding window limit necessary for the safety of the bridge.

Our design yields an economic, computation, and communication-efficient bridge. We realize and deploy our bridge prototype bridging Ethereum and Polygon chains over testnets. For a 19-node bridge network, each bridge node takes an average of only 3 msec to detect and sign a source chain request, showing the highly efficiency and low-latency of the bridge.

We revisit Updatable Public-Key Encryption (UPKE), which was introduced as a practical mechanism for building forward-secure cryptographic protocols. We begin by observing that all UPKE notions to date are neither syntactically flexible nor secure enough for the most important multi-party protocols motivating UPKE. We provide an intuitive taxonomy of UPKE properties -- some partially or completely overlooked in the past -- along with an overview of known (explicit and implicit) UPKE constructions. We then introduce a formal UPKE definition capturing all intuitive properties needed for multi-party protocols.

Next, we provide a practical pairing-based construction for which we provide concrete security bounds under a standard assumption in the random oracle and the algebraic group model. The efficiency profile of the scheme compares very favorably with existing UPKE constructions (despite the added flexibility and stronger security). For example, when used to improve the forward security of the Messaging Layer Security protocol [RFC9420], our new UPKE construction requires $\approx 1\%$ of the bandwidth of the next-most efficient UPKE construction satisfying the strongest UPKE notion previously considered.

Blockchain service offerings have seen a rapid rise in recent times. Many of these services realize a decentralized architecture with a threshold adversary to avoid a single point of failure and to mitigate key escrow issues. While payments to such services are straightforward in systems supporting smart contracts, achieving fairness poses challenges in systems like Bitcoin, adhering to the UTXO model with limited scripting capabilities. This is especially challenging without smart contracts, as we wish to pay only the required threshold of t + 1 out of the n servers offering the service together, without any server claiming the payment twice.

In this paper, we introduce VITARIT 1, a novel payment solution tailored for threshold cryptographic services in UTXO systems like Bitcoin. Our approach guarantees robust provable security while facilitating practical deployment. We focus on the t-out-of-n distributed threshold verifiable random function (VRF) service with certain properties, such as threshold BLS signatures, a recently highlighted area of interest. Our protocol enables clients to request verifiable random function (VRF) values from the threshold service, triggering payments to up to t + 1 servers of the distributed threshold VRF.

Our efficient design relies on simple transactions using signature verification scripts, making it immediately applicable in Bitcoin-like systems. We also introduce new tools and techniques at both the cryptographic and transaction layers, including a novel signature-VRF exchange protocol for standard constructions, which may be of independent interest. Addition- ally, our transaction flow design prevents malicious servers from claiming payments twice, offering broader implications for decentralized payment systems. Our prototype implementation shows that in the two-party interaction, the client takes 126.4 msec, and the server takes 204 msec, demonstrating practicality and deployability of the system

Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is currently being discussed as a technology to safeguard communication in a future where quantum computers compromise traditional public-key cryptosystems. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive security evaluation of QKD-based solutions, focusing on real-world use cases sourced from academic literature and industry reports. We analyze these use cases, assess their security and identify the possible advantages of deploying QKD-based solutions. We further compare QKD-based solutions with Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), the alternative approach to achieving security when quantum computers compromise traditional public-key cryptosystems, evaluating their respective suitability for each scenario. Based on this comparative analysis, we critically discuss and comment on which use cases QKD is suited for, considering factors such as implementation complexity, scalability, and long-term security. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the role QKD could play in future cryptographic infrastructures and offer guidance to decision-makers considering the deployment of QKD.

Zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (zk-SNARKs) are a powerful tool for proving computation correctness, attracting significant interest from researchers, developers, and users. However, the complexity of zk-SNARKs has created gaps between these groups, hindering progress. Researchers focus on constructing efficient proving systems with stronger security and new properties, while developers and users prioritize toolchains, usability, and compatibility.

In this work, we provide a comprehensive study of zk-SNARK, from theory to practice, pinpointing gaps and limitations. We first present a master recipe that unifies the main steps in converting a program into a zk-SNARK. We then classify existing zk-SNARKs according to their key techniques. Our classification addresses the main difference in practically valuable properties between existing zk-SNARK schemes. We survey over 40 zk-SNARKs since 2013 and provide a reference table listing their categories and properties. Following the steps in master recipe, we then survey 11 general-purpose popular used libraries. We elaborate on these libraries' usability, compatibility, efficiency and limitations. Since installing and executing these zk-SNARK systems is challenging, we also provide a completely virtual environment in which to run the compiler for each of them. We identify that the proving system is the primary focus in cryptography academia. In contrast, the constraint system presents a bottleneck in industry. To bridge this gap, we offer recommendations and advocate for the opensource community to enhance documentation, standardization and compatibility.

In white-box cryptography, early encoding-based countermeasures have been broken by the DCA attack, leading to the utilization of masking schemes against a surge of automated attacks. The recent filtering attack from CHES 2024 broke the last viable masking scheme from CHES 2021 resisting both computational and algebraic attacks, raising the need for new countermeasures.

In this work, we perform the first formal study of the combinations of existing countermeasures and demonstrate that applying Dummy Shuffling (EUROCRYPT 2021) then ISW masking (CRYPTO 2003) to a circuit carries algebraic, correlation, and filtering security - necessary conditions to withstand state-of-the-art automated attacks. We also show that applying these two countermeasures in the opposite order leads to a Higher-Order Filtering attack, highlighting the importance of the order of application of the combined countermeasures.

We also propose a new masking scheme called S5, standing for the Semi-Shuffled Secret Sharing Scheme, a scheme merging Dummy Shuffling and ISW in a single countermeasure more efficiently than a direct composition.

The Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) is a crucial component in many post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) algorithms, enabling efficient polynomial multiplication. However, the reliability of NTT computations is an important concern, especially for safety-critical applications. This work presents novel techniques to improve the fault tolerance of NTTs used in prominent PQC schemes such as Kyber, Dilithium, and Falcon. The work first establishes a theoretical framework for error detection in NTTs, exploiting the inherent algebraic properties of these transforms. It derives necessary and sufficient conditions for constructing error-detecting vectors that can identify single faults without the need for costly recomputation. For the Dilithium scheme, the work further advances the state-of-the-art by developing the first algorithm capable of detecting up to two maliciously placed faults. The proposed error detection methods are shown to reduce the number of required multiplications by half, leading to significant improvements in computational efficiency compared to existing single error-detecting algorithms. Concrete implementations for Kyber, Dilithium, and Falcon demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of the error-detection scheme.

Correlated randomness lies at the core of efficient modern secure multi-party computation (MPC) protocols. Costs of generating such correlated randomness required for the MPC online phase protocol often constitute a bottleneck in the overall protocol. A recent paradigm of {\em pseudorandom correlation generator} (PCG) initiated by Boyle et al. (CCS'18, Crypto'19) offers an appealing solution to this issue. In sketch, each party is given a short PCG seed, which can be locally expanded into long correlated strings, satisfying the target correlation. Among various types of correlations, there is oblivious linear evaluation (OLE), a fundamental and useful primitive for typical MPC protocols on arithmetic circuits. Towards efficient generating a great amount of OLE, and applications to MPC protocols, we establish the following results:

(i) We propose a novel {\em programmable} PCG construction for OLE over any field $\mathbb{F}_p$. For $kN$ OLE correlations, we require $O(k\log{N})$ communication and $O(k^2N\log{N})$ computation, where $k$ is an arbitrary integer $\geq 2$. Previous works either have quadratic computation (Boyle et al. Crypto'19), or can only support fields of size larger than $2$ (Bombar et al. Crypto'23).

(ii) We extend the above OLE construction to provide various types of correlations for any finite field. One of the fascinating applications is an efficient PCG for two-party {\em authenticated Boolean multiplication triples}. For $kN$ authenticated triples, we offer PCGs with seed size of $O(k^2\log{N})$ bits. To our best knowledge, such correlation has not been realized with sublinear communication and quasi-linear computation ever before.

(iii) In addition, the \emph{programmability} admits efficient PCGs for multi-party Boolean triples, and thus the first efficient MPC protocol for Boolean circuits with {\em silent} preprocessing. In particular, we show $kN$ $m$-party Boolean multiplication triples can be generated in $O(m^2k\log{N})$-bit communication, while the state-of-the-art FOLEAGE (Asiacrypt'24) requires a broadcast channel and takes $mkN+O(m^2\log{kN})$ bits communication.

(iv) Finally, we present efficient PCGs for circuit-dependent preprocessing, matrix multiplications triples, and string OTs etc. Compared to previous works, each has its own right.

A secret sharing scheme is a cryptographic primitive that allows a dealer to share a secret among a set of parties, so that only authorized subsets of them can recover it. The access structure of the scheme is the family of authorized subsets. In a weighted threshold secret sharing scheme, each party is assigned a weight according to its importance, and the authorized subsets are those in which the sum of their weights is at least the threshold value.

For these access structures, the best general constructions were presented by Beimel and Weinreb [IPL 2006]: The scheme with perfect security has share size $n^{O(\log n)}$, while the scheme with computational security has share size polynomial in $n$. However, these constructions require the use of shallow monotone sorting networks, which limits their practical use.

In this context, we revisit this work and provide variants of these constructions that are feasible in practice. This is done by considering alternative circuits and formulas for weighted threshold functions that do not require monotone sorting networks. We show that, under the assumption that subexponentially secure one-way functions exist, any WTAS over $n$ parties and threshold $\sigma$ admits a computational secret sharing scheme where the size of the shares is $\mathrm{polylog}(n)$ and the size of the public information is $O(n^2\log n\log \sigma)$. Moreover, we show that any authorized subset only needs to download $O(n\log n\log \sigma)$ bits of public information to recover the secret.

Recent server-side optimizations like speculative decoding significantly enhance the interactivity and resource efficiency of Large Language Model (LLM) services. However, we show that these optimizations inadvertently introduce new side-channel vulnerabilities through network packet timing and size variations that tend to be input-dependent. Network adversaries can leverage these side channels to learn sensitive information contained in \emph{encrypted} user prompts to and responses from public LLM services.

This paper formalizes the security implications using a novel indistinguishability framework and introduces a novel attack that establishes the insecurity of real-world LLM services with streaming APIs under our security framework.

Our proposed attack effectively deconstructs encrypted network packet traces to reveal the sizes of underlying LLM-generated tokens and whether the tokens were generated with or without certain server-side optimizations. Our attack can accurately predict private attributes in real-world privacy-sensitive LLM applications in medicine and finance with $71$--$92\%$ accuracy on an open-source vLLM service and $50$--$90\%$ accuracy on the commercial ChatGPT service. Finally, we show that solutions that hide these side channels to different degrees expose a tradeoff between security and performance --- specifically, interactivity and network bandwidth overheads.