International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher to contribute a project named LibreCloud on self hosted, distributed, redundant and secured cloud services. The main goal of the LibreCloud project is to help end users to better control their personal information and data, at a very low cost and with the quality of service of a commercial cloud solution.

The LibreCloud project aims at packaging a GNU/Linux distribution tailored for cheap and power efficient personal computers (Raspberry Pi, Parallella, Plug Computers). The distribution shall be easy to install and manage and shall embed the largest possible set of services (agenda, notes, address books, bookmarks, keyring, storage, e-mail,...) that are usually found on commercial cloud infrastructures. Its main characteristics shall be strong security (privacy, confidentiality, integrity) and safety (redundancy, backups, continuous availability across time and space).

It is quite common nowadays for data owners to outsource their data to the cloud.

However, since the cloud is not fully trusted, the outsourced data should be encrypted, which brings a range of problems, such as: How can authorized data users search over a data owner\'s outsourced encrypted data?

How should a data owner grant search capabilities to data users?

How can data users be assured that the cloud faithfully executed the search operations? Towards ultimately addressing these problems, in this paper we propose a novel cryptographic scheme, called {\\em verifiable attribute-based keyword search} (\\vabks). This scheme

allows a data user, whose attributes or credentials satisfy a data owner\'s access control policy,

to (i) search over the data owner\'s outsourced encrypted data,

(ii) outsource the tedious search operations to the cloud, and

(iii) verify whether the cloud has faithfully executed the search operations.

We define \\vabks\'s security properties, and present concrete constructions that are proven to possess these properties. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed schemes are practical.

This paper proposes an efficient secret key cryptosystem based on polar codes over Binary Erasure Channel. We introduce a method, for the first time to our knowledge, to hide the generator matrix of the polar codes from an attacker. In fact, our main goal is to achieve secure and reliable communication using finite-length polar codes. The proposed cryptosystem has a significant security advantage against chosen plaintext attacks in comparison with the Rao-Nam cryptosystem. Also, the key length is decreased after applying a new compression algorithm. Moreover, this scheme benefits from high code rate and proper error performance for reliable communication.

Internet voting continues to enjoy wide interest from both research and practice. Among the Internet voting schemes developed over the last decades, JCJ / Civitas stands out from the masses due to its innovative approach to resist voter coercion. To achieve its ambitious goal, the scheme builds upon particularly restrictive assumptions and an abstract credential handling rendering the scheme impractical for real-world use. At ARES 2012, Neumann and Volkamer presented a proposal which implements several of these assumptions (voter-side assumptions) and the credential handling by the use of smart cards. While addressing these practical shortcomings of JCJ / Civitas, their proposal did not take performance into account, and accordingly its performance has not been evaluated. In the present work, we revise the ARES proposal from a performance perspective in a security-invariant manner. Based on the herein proposed revisions, we are able to conclude that the revised ARES proposal is feasible to be used in real-world elections.

Distance-bounding is a practical solution to be used in security-sensitive contexts, to prevent relay attacks. Its applied cryptographic role is definitely spreading fast and it is clearly far reaching, extending from contactless payments to remote car unlocking. However, security models for distance-bounding are not well-established and, as far as we know, no existing protocol is proven to resist all classical attacks: distance-fraud, mafia-fraud, and terrorist-fraud. We herein amend the latter, whilst maintaining the lightweight nature that makes these protocols appropriate for concrete applications. Firstly, we develop a general formalism for distance-bounding protocols and their security requirements. In fact, we also propose specifications of generalised frauds, stemming from the (attack-prone) multi-party scenarios. This entails our incorporation of newly advanced threats, e.g., distance-hijacking. Recently, Boureanu et al. proposed the SKI protocol. We herein extend it and prove its security. To attain resistance to terrorist-fraud, we put forward the use of a leakage scheme and of secret sharing, which we specialise and reinforce with additional requirements. In view of resistance to generalised mafia-frauds (and terrorist frauds), we further introduce the notion of circular-keying for pseudorandom functions (PRFs); this notion models the employment of a PRF, with possible linear reuse of the key. We also identify the need of PRF masking to fix common mistakes in existing security proofs/claims of distance-fraud security. We then enhance our design such that we guarantee resistance to terrorist-fraud in the presence of noise. To our knowledge, all this gives rises the first practical and provably secure class of distance-bounding protocols, even when our protocols are run in noisy communications, which is indeed the real-life setting of deployed, time-critical cryptographic protocols.

Abstract.In this paper, we propose a high-throughput pipeline architecture of the stream cipher ZUC which has been included in the security portfolio of 3GPP LTE-Advanced. In the literature, the schema with the highest throughput only implements the working stage of ZUC. The schemas which implement ZUC completely can only achieve a much lower throughput, since a self-feedback loop in the critical path significantly reduces operating frequency. In this paper we design a mixed two-stage pipeline architecture which not only completely implements ZUC but also significantly raises the throughput. We have imple-mented our architecture on FPGA and ASIC. On FPGA platform, the new architecture increases the throughput by 45%, compared with the latest work, and particularly the new architecture also saves nearly 12% of hardware resource. On 65nm ASIC technology, the throughput of the new design can up to 80Gbps, which is 2.7 times faster than the fastest one in the literature, in particularly, it also saves at least 40% of hardware resource. In addition to the academic design, compared with the fastest commercial design, the new architecture doubles the throughput of that. To the best of our knowledge, this evaluation

result is so far the best outcome. It can be assumed that hardware implementations of ZUC following our architecture will fit in future LTE equipments better

The equivalence of the random oracle model and the ideal cipher model has been studied in a long series of results. Holenstein, Künzler, and Tessaro (STOC, 2011) have recently completed the picture positively, assuming that, roughly speaking, equivalence is indifferentiability from each other. However, under the stronger notion of reset indifferentiability this picture changes significantly, as Demay et al. (EUROCRYPT, 2013) and Luykx et al. (ePrint, 2012) demonstrate.

We complement these latter works in several ways. First, we show that any simulator satisfying the reset indifferentiability notion must be stateless and pseudo-deterministic. Using this characterization we show that, with respect to reset indifferentiability, two ideal models are either equivalent or incomparable, that is, a model cannot be strictly stronger than the other model. In the case of the random oracle model and the ideal cipher model, this implies that the two are incomparable. Finally, we examine weaker notions of reset indifferentiability that, while not being able to allow composition in general, allow composition for a large class of multi-stage games. Here we show that the seemingly much weaker notion of 1-reset indifferentiability proposed by Luykx et al. is equivalent to reset indifferentiability. Hence, the impossibility of coming up with a reset indifferentiable construction transfers to the setting where only one reset is permitted, thereby re-opening the quest for an achievable and meaningful notion in between the two variants.

In this paper we propose a solution to enable an accurate terminal revocation in the Extended Access Control (EAC). Chaabouni and Vaudenay in [CV09] pointed out the need for an accurate revocation procedure, but failed to provide a complete solution description. We aim at filling this gap. Our solution relies on augmenting terminal authentication with a t-out-of-l threshold signature provided by neighboring terminals. These terminals will be in charge of checking the revocation status of the requested terminal. As Terminals have a real clock embedded and more computational power than Machine Readable Travel Documents (MRTDs), they are better suited for checking revocation status.

The Cryptography group within the Department of Computer Science has grown considerably in the last year and additional researchers are required in the following areas:

- Analysis of “real world” protocols

- Formal Methods applied to security protocols

- Fully Homomorphic Encryption

- Lattice Based Cryptography

- Provable Security, i.e. Protocol and Mechanism design

- Multi-Party Computation

You will hold a PhD, or expect to be awarded soon, and have experience in one of the sub-areas of cryptography mentioned above.

You will have a good level of analytical skills and the ability to communicate complex information clearly, both orally and through the written word together with the ability to use personal initiative, and creativity, to solve problems encountered in the research context.

Ideally, you will also have a strong publication record in top relevant venues, such as the IACR conferences and journal, ACM-CCS, IEEE S&P, ESORICS, etc

Appointment may be made at the Research Assistant (grade I) or Research Associate (grade J) level depending on skills and experience and will be for 2 to 3 years in the first instance.

We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher to participate in Project CATREL (theoretical and practical improvements for algorithms for breaking discrete logarithms over finite fields). This two-year position is with the GRACE team at the École polytechnique (in the southern suburbs of Paris), starting no later than January 1, 2014.

For more information, see

http://catrel.loria.fr/

http://catrel.loria.fr/positions.en.html

http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/cryptologie/

Candidates should have a PhD in number theory or computer science.

Good programming skills and knowledge of number theory are essential; experience in C/C++ development, algorithmic number theory, and computer algebra systems (such as Magma, Sage, Pari-GP, etc) would be an advantage.

Proxy re-encryption (PRE) allows a semi-trusted proxy to convert a ciphertext intended for Alice into a ciphertext for Bob without learning anything about the underlying plaintext. Chunbo Ma et al. have proposed a group based proxy re-encryption scheme to convert a ciphertext from one group to another. Any group member can independently decrypt the ciphertexts encrypted to its group. In their paper, the authors gave a security proof to say that the scheme is secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack. However, we highlight the flaws in their scheme and show that their scheme is not secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack. In this direction, we construct an adversary who issues only one decryption oracle query and break the security of their scheme with non-negligible advantage.

Most computational soundness theorems deal with a limited number of primitives, thereby limiting their applicability. The notion of deduction soundness of Cortier and Warinschi (CCS\'11) aims to facilitate soundness theorems for richer frameworks via composition results: deduction soundness extends, generically, with asymmetric encryption and public data structures. Unfortunately, that paper also hints at rather serious limitations regarding further composition results: composability with digital signatures seems to be precluded.

In this paper we provide techniques for bypassing the perceived limitations of deduction soundness and demonstrate that it enjoys vastly improved composition properties. More precisely, we show that a deduction sound implementation can be modularly extended with all of the basic cryptographic primitives (symmetric/asymmetric encryption, message authentication codes, digital signatures, and hash functions). We thus obtain the first soundness framework that allows for the joint use of multiple instances of all of the basic primitives.

In addition, we show how to overcome an important restriction of the bare deduction soundness framework which forbids sending encrypted secret keys. In turn, this prevents its use for the analysis of a large class of interesting protocols (e.g. key exchange protocols). We allow for more liberal uses of keys as long as they are hidden in a sense that we also define. All primitives typically used to send secret data (symmetric/asymmetric encryption) satisfy our requirement which we also show to be preserved under composition.

We study exponentiations in pairing groups for the most common security levels and show that, although the Weierstrass model is preferable for pairing computation, it can be worthwhile to map to alternative curve representations for the non-pairing group operations in protocols.

We are looking for an excellent PhD candidate to work in the area of information and communication security with a focus on authentication problems in constrained settings. This is particularly important for applications involving mobile phones, wireless communication and RFID systems, which suffer from restrictions in terms of power resources, network connectivity, computational capabilities, as well as potential privacy issues. The overall aim of the project will be to develop nearly optimal algorithms for achieving security and privacy while minimising resource use.

More concretely, part of the research will involve the analysis and development of authentication protocols in specific settings. This will include investigating resistance of both existing and novel protocols against different types of attacks, theoretically and experimentally. In addition to investigating established settings, such as RFID authentication, the research will also explore more general authentication problems, such as those that arise in the context of trust in social networks, smartphone applications and collaborative data processing. This will be done by grounding the work in a generalised decision-making framework. The project should result in the development of theory and authentication mechanisms for noisy, constrained settings that strike an optimal balance between reliable authentication, privacy-preservation and resource consumption. Some previous research related to this research project can be found here: http://lasecwww.epfl.ch/~katerina/Publications.html

Applicants for the position shall have a Master’s Degree or corresponding in Computer Science, Informatics, Telecommunications or in a related discipline. A master\\\'s degree in information security or cryptography is a bonus.

We introduce a new technique, that we call punctured programs,

to apply indistinguishability obfuscation towards cryptographic

problems. We use this technique to carry out a systematic study of

the applicability of indistinguishability obfuscation to a variety of

cryptographic goals. Along the way, we resolve the 16-year-old open

question of Deniable Encryption, posed by Canetti, Dwork, Naor,

and Ostrovsky in 1997: In deniable encryption, a sender who is forced

to reveal to an adversary both her message and the randomness she used

for encrypting it should be able to convincingly provide ``fake\'\'

randomness that can explain any alternative message that she would

like to pretend that she sent. We resolve this question by giving the

first construction of deniable encryption that does not require

any pre-planning by the party that must later issue a denial.

In addition, we show the generality of our punctured programs

technique by also constructing a variety of core cryptographic objects

from indistinguishability obfuscation and one-way functions (or close

variants). In particular we obtain: public key encryption, short

``hash-and-sign\'\' selectively secure signatures, chosen-ciphertext

secure public key encryption, non-interactive zero knowledge proofs

(NIZKs), injective trapdoor functions, and oblivious transfer. These

results suggest the possibility of indistinguishability

obfuscation becoming a ``central hub\'\' for cryptography.

The goal of white-box cryptography is to design implementations of common cryptographic algorithm (e.g. AES) that remain secure against an attacker with full control of the implementation and execution environment. This concept was put forward a decade ago by Chow et al. (SAC 2002) who proposed the first white-box implementation of AES. Since then, several works have been dedicated to the design of new implementations and/or the breaking of existing ones.

In this paper, we describe a new attack against the original implementation of Chow et al. (SAC 2002), which efficiently recovers the AES secret key as well as the private external encodings in complexity $2^{22}$. Compared to the previous attack due to Billet et al. (SAC 2004) of complexity $2^{30}$, our attack is not only more efficient but also simpler to implement. Then, we show that the \\emph{last} candidate white-box AES implementation due to Karroumi (ICISC 2010) can be broken by a direct application of either Billet et al. attack or ours. Specifically, we show that for any given secret key, the overall implementation has the \\emph{exact same} distribution as the implementation of Chow et al. making them both vulnerable to the same attacks.

By improving the state of the art of white-box cryptanalysis and putting forward new attack techniques, we believe our work brings new insights on the failure of existing white-box implementations, which could be useful for the design of future solutions.

I must admit that I do not find D.J. Bernstein’s assessment appropriate, for a number of reasons. First of all, the optical example he gives does not really apply to the work of Rührmair et al. They only discuss modeling attacks on electrical PUFs with digital, one-bit outputs. Such outputs can easily be imitated if an efficient algorithm that predicts the electrical PUF is known. The simulation algorithms which Rührmair et al. derive are, in fact, extremely simple. They often merely require the addition of small integers, followed by a comparison operation. If implemented, their form factor would be quite close to a “real PUF”. In particular, they could be easily implemented in smart cards and the like, which are one of the standard application examples for PUFs. In order to notice the difference, honest users would have to physically open the PUF/smart card and inspect it with utmost thoroughness, which is in an impractical task for the average user. This makes the simulation algorithms of Rührmair et al an extremely effective way to cheat. Furthermore, even if the outputs of a PUF are analog and complex (as in the case of optical PUFs), a simulation algorithm can be used to break certain protocols. For example, an exchanged key can be derived already from mere numeric simulations of the PUF. The exact analog imitation of the complex optical signal is not necessary to this end. I also cannot share D.J. Bernstein’s claim that the authors would exaggerate their results. They give intensive and, in my opinion, well-balanced discussions on the reach, but at the same time on the limitations of their techniques in the introduction section (and partly also in the summary section). For example, they make clear that their attacks apply to so-called “Weak PUFs” only under very rare circumstances, and that they do not apply at all to Coating PUFs, SRAM PUFs, or Butterfly PUFs. Any readers who had a short glimpse at the introduction cannot miss this discussion, and could hardly make claims on a “PUF-exaggeration”, as the ones we have seen. Finally, it may be interesting to add that following its publication on the ePrint archive, the paper has been accepted to CCS in 2010. It has been quoted multiple times in the meantime (please see Google scholar). It is clear that such acceptance and citation numbers cannot always prove the quality of scientific work. But in this case, they show at least that the paper has been received rather well in the PUF community, which is somewhat at odds with D.J. Bernstein’s (perhaps too harsh) criticism of the paper. GeorgeBest From: 2013-22-07 15:15:59 (UTC)

Katz et al. provided a generic transform to construct aggregate message authentication codes and imposed a lower bound on the length of one aggregate MAC tag. The lower bound shows that the required tag length is at least linear with the number of messages when fast verification such as constant or logarithmic computation overhead is required. Aggregate message authentication codes are useful in settings such as mobile ad-hoc networks where devices are resource-constrained and energy cost is at a premium. In this paper, we introduce the notion of sequential aggregate message authentication code (SAMAC). We present a security model for this notion under unforgeability against chosen message and verification query attack and construct an efficient SAMAC scheme by extending a number-theoretic MAC construction due to Dodis et al. We prove the security of our SAMAC scheme under the CDH assumption in the standard model. Our SAMAC scheme improves the lower bound with the help of the underlying algebraic structure. Performance analysis shows that our SAMAC scheme yields constant computation for the verifier as well as fixed length for one aggregate.

Lightweight block ciphers are designed so as to fit into very constrained environments, but usually not really with software performance in mind. For classical lightweight applications where many constrained devices communicate with a server, it is also crucial that the cipher has good software performance on the server side. Recent work has shown that bitslice implementations applied to Piccolo and PRESENT led to very good software speeds, thus making lightweight ciphers interesting for cloud applications. However, we remark that bitslice implementations might not be interesting for some situations, where the amount of data to be enciphered at a time is usually small, and very little work has been done on non-bitslice implementations.

In this article, we explore general software implementations of lightweight ciphers on x86 architectures, with a special focus on LED, Piccolo and PRESENT. First, we analyze table-based implementations, and we provide a theoretical model to predict the behavior of various possible trade-offs depending on the processor cache latency profile. We obtain the fastest table-based implementations for our lightweight ciphers, which is of interest for legacy processors. Secondly, we apply to our portfolio of primitives the vperm implementation trick for 4-bit Sboxes, which gives good performance, extra side-channels protection, and is quite fit for many lightweight primitives. Finally, we investigate bitslice implementations, analyzing various costs which are usually neglected (bitsliced form (un)packing, key schedule, etc.), but that must be taken in account for many lightweight applications. We finally discuss which type of implementation seems to be the best suited depending on the applications profile.

In 2013, Joux, and then Barbulescu, Gaudry, Joux and Thom\\\'{e},

presented new algorithms for computing discrete logarithms in finite

fields of small and medium characteristic. We show that these new

algorithms render the finite field $\\Fmain = \\FF_{3^{3054}}$ weak for

discrete logarithm cryptography in the sense that discrete logarithms

in this field can be computed significantly faster than with the

previous fastest algorithms. Our concrete analysis shows that the

supersingular elliptic curve over $\\FF_{3^{509}}$ with embedding degree

6 that had been considered for implementing pairing-based cryptosystems

at the 128-bit security level in fact provides only a significantly

lower level of security.