IACR News
Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:
30 May 2017
Ljubljana, Slovenia, 16 November - 17 November 2017
Event CalendarSubmission deadline: 19 June 2017
Notification: 18 September 2017
Tartu, Estonia, 8 November - 10 November 2017
Event CalendarSubmission deadline: 21 July 2017
Notification: 4 September 2017
University of Oxford
Job PostingThe D.Phil. studentship will start on 1 October 2017, and will be based at the Mathematical Institute. The studentship is fully funded, and includes standard stipends and College and University fees at the Home rate. The studentship is attached to St Hughs College (http://www.st-hughs.ox.ac.uk/).
Many cryptographic protocols that are used today rely on the difficulty of either factoring or some discrete logarithm problem. However due to Shor’s algorithms, these protocols will become completely unsecure once a large-scale quantum computer is built. Given recent advances in that direction, the UK government is supporting research on new cryptographic protocols that can resist attacks by quantum computers, and the DPhil student will work in this context.
The project will aim at developing post-quantum cryptographic protocols and at studying their security with respect to both classical and quantum computers. The D Phil student will be part of the Oxford Cryptography Group and they will work under the supervision of Dr Christophe Petit (http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/petit/) and of Professor Cas Cremers (https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/cas.cremers/). Information on the Cryptography Group can be found at www.maths.ox.ac.uk/groups/cryptography.
Candidates must have an excellent background in mathematics, computer science or physics and the ability and willingness to work on inter-disciplinary research projects. Acquaintance with cryptography concepts and/or quantum algorithms as well as some programming skills will be considered as strong assets. The students will also be expected to spend a few weeks at Cheltenham every year. Candidates must therefore be able to obtain a DV security clearance prior to starting their D Phil; in particular they must be UK citizens.
Applications should be made online following the link below. They will be reviewed as they arrive, until the position is filled with a suitable candidate.
Closing date for applications: 1 October 2017
Contact: christophe.petit (at) maths.ox.ac.uk
More information: https://evision.ox.ac.uk/urd/sits.urd/run/siw_ipp_lgn.login?process=siw_ipp_app_crs
EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, Europe
Job Posting- Next generation blockchain and distributed ledger technologies with applications - to cryptocurrencies and beyond.
- Large-scale, low-latency anonymous messaging and blogging.
- Tracking-resistant WiFi and peer-to-peer ad-hoc networking.
- User-friendly, privacy- and security-hardened operating systems.
- Systematic defenses against side-channel and fingerprinting attacks.
Closing date for applications: 31 July 2017
Contact: Bryan Ford, Associate Professor, bryan.ford (at) epfl.ch
Angela Devenoge, Secretary, angela.devenoge (at) epfl.ch
Linus Gasser, Computer Scientist, linus.gasser (at) epfl.ch
More information: http://dedis.epfl.ch
29 May 2017
Léo Ducas, Alice Pellet--Mary
ePrint ReportThe naive version of the GGH13 scheme was deemed susceptible to averaging attacks, i.e., a statistical leak (yet no precise attack was claimed). A countermeasure was therefore devised, but it remains heuristic. Recently, to reach MMaps with low noise and modulus, variants of this countermeasure were developed by Döttling et al. (EPRINT:2016/599), but their effectiveness is even less clear than in the original scheme.
In this work, we propose a systematic study of this statistical leak, to conclude on the effectiveness of the countermeasure and its variants. In particular, among the two variants proposed by Döttling et al., the so-called conservative method is in fact ineffective: a sensitive secret value is leaked, the very same value as in the unprotected method. Additionally, we note that the other methods also leak secret values, but they seem less sensitive.
As a conclusion, we propose yet another countermeasure, for which this leak is made unrelated to all secrets. On our way, we also make explicit and tighten the hidden exponents in the size of the parameters, as an effort to assess and improve the efficiency of MMaps.
Divesh Aggarwal, Antoine Joux, Anupam Prakash, Miklos Santa
ePrint ReportThomas Prest
ePrint ReportFirst, we give theoretic results which renders it more efficient and easier to use. This is done by providing two lemmas, which give tight bounds in very common situations { for distributions that are tailcut or have a bounded relative error. We then connect the Rényi divergence to the max-log distance. This allows the Rényi divergence to indirectly benefit from all the advantages of a distance.
Second, we apply our new results to five practical usecases. It allows us to claim 256 bits of security for a floating-point precision of 53 bits, in cases that until now either required more than 150 bits of precision or were limited to 100 bits of security: rejection sampling, trapdoor sampling (61 bits in this case) and a new sampler by Micciancio and Walter. We also propose a new and compact approach for table-based sampling, and squeeze the standard deviation of trapdoor samplers by a factor that provides a gain of 30 bits of security in practice.
Privacy-Preserving Aggregation of Time-Series Data with Public Verifiability from Simple Assumptions
Keita Emura
ePrint ReportAnne Canteaut, Eran Lambooij, Samuel Neves, Shahram Rasoolzadeh, Yu Sasaki, Marc Stevens
ePrint ReportDan Boneh, Sam Kim, David J. Wu
ePrint ReportMihir Bellare, Adam O'Neill, Igors Stepanovs
ePrint Report28 May 2017
Pooya Farshim, Louiza Khati, Damien Vergnaud
ePrint ReportBart Mennink
ePrint ReportBart Mennink, Samuel Neves
ePrint ReportCengiz Orencik, Erkay Savas, Mahmoud Alewiwi
ePrint ReportJacob Alperin-Sheriff, Jintai Ding, Albrecht Petzoldt, Daniel Smith Tone
ePrint ReportJosé Becerra, Vincenzo Iovino, Dimiter Ostrev, Marjan Skrobot
ePrint ReportHiroaki Anada, Seiko Arita
ePrint ReportPaul Grubbs, Thomas Ristenpart, Vitaly Shmatikov
ePrint ReportSam Kim, David J. Wu
ePrint ReportIn this work, we give the first ACE scheme for arbitrary policies from standard assumptions. Our construction is generic and can be built from the combination of a digital signature scheme, a predicate encryption scheme, and a (single-key) functional encryption scheme that supports randomized functionalities. All of these primitives can be instantiated from standard assumptions in the plain model, and so, we obtain the first ACE scheme capable of supporting general policies from standard assumptions. One possible instantiation of our construction relies upon standard number-theoretic assumptions (namely, the DDH and RSA assumptions) and standard lattice assumptions (namely, LWE). Finally, we conclude by introducing several extensions to the ACE framework to support dynamic and more fine-grained access control policies.