International Association
for Cryptologic Research

In this paper we propose new methods to blind exponents

used in RSA and in elliptic curves based algorithms. Due to classical

differential power analysis (DPA and CPA), a lot of countermeasures to

protect exponents have been proposed since 1999 Kocher [20] and by

Coron [13]. However, these blinding methods present some drawbacks

regarding execution time and memory cost. It also got some weaknesses.

Indeed they could also be targeted by some attacks such as The Carry

Leakage on the Randomized Exponent proposed by P.A. Fouque et al.

in [23] or inefficient against some others analysis such as Single Power

Analysis. In this article, we explain how the most used method could

be exploited when an attacker can access test samples. We target here

new dynamic blinding methods in order to prevent from any learning

phase and also to improve the resistance against the latest side channel

analyses published.

Flush+Reload is a cache side-channel attack that monitors access to data in shared pages. In this paper we demonstrate how to use the attack to extract private encryption keys from GnuPG. The high resolution and low noise of the Flush+Reload attack enables a spy program to recover over 98% of the bits of the private key in a single decryption or signing round. Unlike previous attacks, the attack targets the last level L3 cache. Consequently, the spy program and the victim do not need to share the execution core of the CPU. The attack is not limited to a traditional OS and can be used in a virtualised environment, where it can attack programs executing in a different VM.

We remark that AKS primality testing algorithm needs about 1,000,000,000 G (gigabyte) storage space for a number of 1024 bits. Such storage requirement is hard to meet in practice. To the best of our knowledge, it is impossible for current operating systems to write and read data in so huge storage space. Thus, the running time for AKS algorithm shuould not be simply estimated as usual in terms of the amount of arithmetic operations.

White-box cryptography aims to protect the secret key of a cipher in an environment in which an adversary has full access to the implementation of the cipher and its execution environment. In 2002, Chow, Eisen, Johnson and van Oorschot proposed a white-box implementation of AES. In 2004, Billet, Gilbert and Ech-Chatbi presented an efficient attack (referred to as the BGE attack) on this implementation, extracting its embedded AES key with a work factor of $2^{30}$. In 2012, Tolhuizen presented an improvement of the most time-consuming phase of the BGE attack. This paper presents several improvements to the other phases of the BGE attack. The paper shows that the overall work factor of the BGE attack is reduced to $2^{22}$ when all improvements are implemented. In 2010, Karroumi presented a white-box AES implementation that is designed to withstand the BGE attack. This paper shows that the implementations of Karroumi and Chow \\emph{et al.} are the same. As a result, Karroumi\'s white-box AES implementation is vulnerable to the attack it was designed to resist.

In this work, we study indistinguishability obfuscation and functional encryption for general circuits:

Indistinguishability obfuscation requires that given any two equivalent circuits C_0 and C_1 of similar size, the obfuscations of C_0 and C_1 should be computationally indistinguishable.

In functional encryption, ciphertexts encrypt inputs x and keys are issued for circuits C. Using the key SK_C to decrypt a ciphertext CT_x = Enc(x), yields the value C(x) but does not reveal anything else about x. Furthermore, no collusion of secret key holders should be able to learn anything more than the union of what they can each learn individually.

We give constructions for indistinguishability obfuscation and functional encryption that supports all polynomial-size circuits. We accomplish this goal in three steps:

- We describe a candidate construction for indistinguishability obfuscation for NC1 circuits. The security of this construction is based on a new algebraic hardness assumption. The candidate and assumption use a simplified variant of multilinear maps, which we call Multilinear Jigsaw Puzzles.

- We show how to use indistinguishability obfuscation for NC1 together with Fully Homomorphic Encryption (with decryption in NC1) to achieve indistinguishability obfuscation for all circuits.

- Finally, we show how to use indistinguishability obfuscation for circuits, public-key encryption, and non-interactive zero knowledge to achieve functional encryption for all circuits. The functional encryption scheme we construct also enjoys succinct ciphertexts, which enables several other applications.

In this paper, we propose two new frameworks for joint encryption encoding schemes based on polar codes, namely efficient and secure joint secret/public key encryption channel coding schemes. The issue of using new coding structure, i.e. polar codes in McEliece-like and RN-like schemes is addressed. Cryptanalysis methods show that the proposed schemes have an acceptable level of security with a relatively smaller key size in comparison with the previous works. The results indicate that both schemes provide an efficient error performance and benefit from the higher code rate which can approach to the channel capacity for large enough polar codes. The resulted characteristics of the proposed schemes make them suitable for high-speed communications, such as deep space communication systems.

Peris-Lopez et al. recently provides some guidelines that should be followed to

design a secure yoking-proof protocol. In addition, conforming to those guidelines and

EPC C1 G2, they presented a yoking-proof for low-cost RFID tags, named Kazahaya. However,

in this letter, we scrutinize its security showing how an passive adversary can retrieve secret

parameters of patient\'s tag in cost of O(216) o-line PRNG evaluations. Given the tag\'s secret

parameters, any security claims are ruined. Nevertheless, to show other weaknesses of the

protocol and rule out any possible improvement by increasing the length of the used PRNG,

we presented a forgery attack that shows that a proof generated at time tn can be used to

forge a valid proof for any desired time tj . The success probability of this attack is `1\' and the

complexity is negligible.

We are looking for a post-doc researcher to join a vibrant and growing team of security researchers at the Centre for Cybercrime and Computer Security (CCCS) at Newcastle University, UK. Newcastle University is recognized by EPSRC/GCHQ as one of the 11 Academic Centres of Excellence in Cyber Security Research in the country.

The post is supported by a five-year ERC Starting Grant on \\\"Self-enforcing Electronic Voting: Trustworthy Elections in the Presence of Corrupt Authorities\\\". The candidate should have a PhD in Computer Science, engineering or a related discipline, with a solid background in security. Previous research experience on e-voting is desirable but not required.

An ideal candidate would be the one who 1) has good understanding of theory; 2) has good practical skills; 3) has a keen interest to tackle real-world problems.

Submission: 12 November 2013
Notification: 18 January 2014
From March 3 to March 5
Location: London, United Kingdom
More Information: http://fse2014.isg.rhul.ac.uk

We study various classical secure computation problems in the context of fairness, and relate them with each other. We also systematically study fair sampling problems (i.e., inputless functionalities) and discover three levels of complexity for them.

Our results include the following:

-Fair exchange cannot be securely reduced to the problem of fair coin-tossing by an r-round protocol, except with an error that is $\\Omega(1/r)$.

-Finite fair {\\em sampling} problems with rational probabilities can all be reduced to fair coin-tossing and unfair 2-party computation (or equivalently, under computational assumptions). Thus, for this class of functionalities, fair coin-tossing is complete.

-Only sampling problems which have fair protocols without any fair setup are the trivial ones in which the two parties can sample their outputs independently. Others all have an $\\Omega(1/r)$ error, roughly matching an upper bound for fair sampling from Moran et al.(TCC 2009).

-We study communication-less protocols for sampling, given another sampling problem as setup, since such protocols are inherently fair. We use spectral graph theoretic tools to show that it is impossible to reduce a sampling problem with {\\em common information} (like fair coin-tossing) to a sampling problem without (like \'noisy\' coin-tossing, which has a small probability of disagreement).

The last result above is a slightly sharper version of a classical result by Witsenhausen from 1975. Our proof reveals the connection between the tool used by Witsenhausen, namely \'maximal correlation\', and spectral graph theoretic tools like Cheeger inequality.

Transferable conditional electronic-cash (e-cash) allows a payer to spend an e-cash based on the outcome not known in advance. It also allows a payee to spend the e-cash to others, or deposit the e-cash to a bank based on the future outcome. Among security properties, the anonymity of the payer has been widely studied. However, the payer is linkable in the existing conditional e-cash schemes. This paper presents the first optimally anonymous and transferable conditional electronic-cash (e-cash) system based on two recent cryptographic primitives, i.e., the Groth-Sahai(GS) proof system

and the commuting signatures, to obtain the user\'s unlinkability and optimal anonymity. A publisher is introduced to publish the conditions, and is firstly formalized. By dividing the deposit protocol into two parts, the anonymity of the user is obtained in the deposit protocol. Compared with the existing conditional e-cash schemes, this scheme has the constant size for the computation and communication. Finally, we give the security proof in the standard model.

Most implementations of public key cryptography employ exponentiation algorithms. Side-channel attacks on secret exponents are typically bound to the leakage of single executions because of cryptographic protocols or side-channel countermeasures such as blinding. We propose a new class of algorithms, i.e. unsupervised cluster classification algorithms, to attack cryptographic exponentiations and recover secret exponents without any prior profiling or heuristic leakage models. Not requiring profiling is a significant advantage to attackers. In fact, the proposed non-profiled single-execution attack is able to exploit any available single-execution leakage and provides a straight-forward option to combine simultaneous measurements to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of available leakage. We present empirical results from attacking an elliptic curve scalar multiplication and exploit location-based leakage from high-resolution electromagnetic field measurements without prior profiling. Individual measurements lead to a sufficiently low remaining brute-force complexity of the secret exponent. An errorless recovery of the exponent is achieved after a combination of few measurements.

There exists a broad range of RFID protocols in literature that propose hash functions as cryptographic primitives. Since Keccak has been selected as the winner of the NIST SHA-3 competition in 2012, there is the question of how far we can push the limits of Keccak to fulfill the stringent requirements of passive low-cost RFID. In this paper, we address this question by presenting a hardware implementation of Keccak that aims for lowest power and lowest area. Our smallest (full-state) design requires only 2\\,927 GEs (for designs with external memory available) and 5\\,522 GEs (total size including memory). It has a power consumption of $12.5\\,\\mu$W at 1\\,MHz on a low leakage 130\\,nm CMOS process technology. As a result, we provide a design that needs 40\\,\\% less resources than related work. Our design is even smaller than the smallest SHA-1 and SHA-2 implementations.

In this paper, information theoretic cryptography is discussed based on conditional Renyi entropies. Our discussion focuses not only on cryptography but also on the denitions of conditional Renyi entropies and the related information theoretic inequalities. First, we revisit conditional Renyi entropies, and clarify what kind of properties are required and actually satised. Then, we propose security criteria based on Renyi entropies, which suggests us deep relations between (conditional) Renyi entropies and error probabilities by using several guessing strategies. Based on these results, unied proof of impossibility, namely, the lower bounds of key sizes is derived based on conditional Renyi entropies. Our model and lower bounds include the Shannon\'s perfect secrecy, and the min-entropy based encryption presented by Dodis, and Alimomeni and Safavi-Naini. Finally, new optimal symmetric key cryptography and almost optimal secret sharing schemes are proposed which achieve our lower bounds.

Cryptographic primitives such as secure hash functions

(e.g., SHA1, SHA2, and SHA3) and symmetric

key block ciphers (e.g., AES and TDES) have been commonly used

to design pseudorandom generators with counter modes

(e.g., in Java Crypto Library and in NIST SP800-90A standards).

It is assumed that if these primitives

are secure then the pseudorandom generators

based on these primitives are also secure. However,

no systematic research and analysis have been done

to support this assumption.

Based on complexity theoretic results for pseudorandom sequences,

this paper analyzes stochastic properties of long sequences

produced by hash function based pseudorandom generators DRBG from

NIST SP800-90A and SHA1PRNG from Java Crypto Library.

Our results show that none of these sequences satisfy the

law of the iterated logarithm (LIL) which holds

for polynomial time pseudorandom sequences. Our results also

show that if the seeds and counters for pseudorandom generators

are not appropriately chosen, then the generated sequences

have strongly biased values for LIL-tests

and could be distinguished from uniformly chosen sequences

with a high probability.

Based on these results, appropriate seeding and counter

methods are proposed for pseudorandom generator designs.

The results in this paper reveal some ``non-random\'\' behavior of

SHA1, SHA2, and of the recently announced SHA3.

In 2010, Bouillaguet et al. proposed an efficient solver for polynomial systems over $\\mathbb{F}_2$ that trades memory for speed. As a result, 48 quadratic equations in 48 variables can be solved on a graphics card (GPU) in 21 minutes. The research question that we would like to answer in this paper is how specifically designed hardware performs on this task. We approach the answer by solving multivariate quadratic systems on reconfigurable hardware, namely Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). We show that, although the algorithm proposed by Bouillaguet et al. has a better asymptotic time complexity than traditional enumeration algorithms, it does not have a better asymptotic complexity in terms of silicon area. Nevertheless, our FPGA implementation consumes 25 times less energy than their GPU implementation. This is a significant improvement, not to mention that the monetary cost per unit of computational power for FPGAs is generally much cheaper than that of GPUs.

We present a new, more constructive proof of von Neumann\'s Min-Max Theorem for two-player zero-sum game --- specifically, an algorithm that builds a near-optimal mixed strategy for the second player from several best-responses of the second player to mixed strategies of the first player. The algorithm extends previous work of Freund and Schapire (Games and Economic Behavior \'99) with the advantage that the algorithm runs in poly(n) time even when a pure strategy for the first player is a distribution chosen from a set of distributions over {0,1}^n. This extension enables a number of additional applications in cryptography and complexity theory, often yielding uniform security versions of results that were previously only proved for nonuniform security (due to use of the non-constructive Min-Max Theorem).

We describe several applications, including: a more modular and improved uniform version of Impagliazzo\'s Hardcore Theorem (FOCS \'95); regularity theorems that provide efficient simulation of distributions within any sufficiently nice convex set (extending a result of Trevisan, Tulsiani and Vadhan (CCC \'09)); an improved version of the Weak Regularity Lemma of Frieze and Kannan; a Dense Model Theorem for uniform algorithms; and showing impossibility of constructing Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments (SNARGs) via black-box reductions under uniform hardness assumptions (using techniques from Gentry and Wichs (STOC \'11) for the nonuniform setting).

From August 14 to August 16
Location: Washington, DC, United States
More Information: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity13

CryptoLux/LACS team of University of Luxembourg is looking for two Ph.D. students in cryptography and information security. We look for excellent candidates (GPA > 80%) interested in: applied cryptography, anonymity and privacy, network/mobile security, code security, embedded systems security, etc. We offer attractive research environment within a large team of cryptographers and IT security experts and a highly competitive salary.

Potential candidates should send their application by email to lacs.acrypt(at)gmail.com. The application material should contain a cover letter explaining the candidate\'s motivation and research interests, a detailed CV (including photo), a list of publications, copies of diploma certificates, and names and contact details of three references.

Positions are available from 1-September 2013.

A leading, financial organisation is searching for a

Head of Card Authentication Services to lead the development of cryptographic applications to further support risk operations.

You will be responsible for developing cryptographic applications utilising your SME knowledge of cryptography. You will utilise your in-depth knowledge of security models and technologies including Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Hardware Security Modules (HSMs). In addition, you will have strong application development knowledge, in particular with Java and .NET technologies. You will draw upon your experience in a similar role where you have delivered change.

This role also requires experience and understanding in authentication.

To be considered for this business critical position, you will have:

* In-depth knowledge of Cryptography concepts and authentican services/practices

* Strong knowledge of PKI

* Extensive knowledge of HSMs

* Developed cryptographic applications

* Adept with Java and .NET technologies

* Delivered change focused projects

* Excellent communication and presentation skills

This is an excellent opportunity for an Information Security Specialist to further progress their knowledge and career within Information Security, for a global organisation who is renowned in the marketplace for their commitment to change.

You will be able to demonstrate your in-depth Information Security knowledge, in particular with cryptography, PKI, authentication, and HSMs. In return, you will be offered a permanent role, a package around £100,000.