International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Provably secure masking schemes always require too many random generations, which significantly increases the implementation cost. Recently in IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION FORENSICS AND SECURITY (TIFS) (DOI:10.1109/TIFS.2017.2713323), Zhang, Qiu, and Zhou improve the efficiency of the CPRR scheme by decreasing the random generations. Recently, Barthe et al. claim that security flaws exist in both proposals and provide the counter-examples. In this paper, we fix these security flaws by changing the addition order. In this way, the two proposals are corrected with no extra random generation.

Event date: 1 April to 1 July 2018
Submission deadline: 31 March 2018
Notification: 30 June 2018

Event date: 30 July to 3 August 2018
Submission deadline: 1 March 2018
Notification: 1 April 2018

DTU Compute’s Sections for Cyber Security, invite applications for an appointment as Associate Professor/Assistant Professor within cyber security. The position is available from April 1, 2018 or according to mutual agreement.

Through the position the University seeks to strengthen the research within cyber security. The cyber security section at DTU has experts in cryptology, in particular the design and analysis of ciphers, hash functions and in side-channel analysis, and in the security of distributed and pervasive computing systems, in particular support for secure collaboration across administrative domains and in other low trust environments. The section wishes to broaden its research within all areas of cyber security.

Topics of particular interest include:

access control (both policies and mechanisms);

authentication and identity management systems;

blockchains and distributed ledger technologies

malware analysis, digital forensics, and ethical hacking;

privacy and privacy enhancing technologies;

security in pervasive computing systems (incl. cyber physical systems, IoT, mobile healthcare systems and wireless computing systems); and

trust management systems.

Interest and skills in pedagogical work and dissemination of mathematical sciences will play an important role.

Closing date for applications: 1 February 2018

Contact: Professor Lars Ramkilde Knudsen, lrkn (at) dtu.dk

More information: http://www.dtu.dk/job/job?id=ad063634-bc8a-42e1-82f1-b6a93908941d

Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) is a young university which was established in collaboration with MIT. iTrust is a Cyber Security Research Center with about 15 multi-discipline faculty members from SUTD. It has the world’s best facilities in cyber-physical systems (CPS) including testbeds for Secure Water Treatment (SWaT), Water Distribution (WADI), Electric Power and Intelligent Control (EPIC), and IoT.

I am looking for postdocs / research fellows with expertise on cyber-physical system security, especially on the legacy CPS protection. The candidates should have track record of strong R&D capability, be able to perform deep system-level investigations of security mechanisms, be a good team player, and also have good written/oral communication skills. The position will provide an excellent opportunity to perform both basic and translational research in close collaboration with industry. Successful candidates will be offered internationally competitive remuneration, and enjoy high-quality living and low tax rates in Singapore.

Interested candidates please send your CV with a research statement to Prof. Jianying Zhou.

Email: jianying_zhou (at) sutd.edu.sg

Home: http://jianying.space/

Closing date for applications: 28 February 2018

Contact: Prof. Jianying Zhou

More information: http://jianying.space/

The standard zero knowledge notion is formalized by requiring that for any probabilistic polynomial-time (PPT) verifier $V^*$, there is a PPT algorithm (simulator) $S_{V^*}$, such that the outputs of $S_{V^*}$ is indistinguishable from real protocol views. The simulator is not permitted to access the verifier $V^*$'s private state. So the power of $S_{V^*}$ is, in fact, inferior to that of $V^*$. In this paper, a new simulation method, called augmented black-box simulation, is presented by permitting the simulator to have access to the verifier's current private state in a special manner. The augmented black-box simulator only has the same computing power as the verifier although it is given access to the verifier's current private state. Therefore, augmented black-box simulation is a reasonable method to prove zero knowledge property, and brings results that hard to obtain with previous simulation techniques. Zero knowledge property, proved by means of augmented black-box simulation, is called augmented black-box zero-knowledge. We present a 5-round statistical augmented black-box zero-knowledge argument for Exact Cover Problem under the Decision Multilinear No-Exact-Cover Assumption. In addition, we show a 2-round computational augmented black-box zero-knowledge argument protocol for Exact Cover problem under the Decision Multilinear No-Exact-Cover Assumption and the assumption of the existence of hash functions. It is well known that 2-round zero knowledge protocols does not exist under general zero knowledge notion. Besides, following [19], we consider leakage-resilient property of augmented black-box zero knowledge, and prove that the presented statistical zero-knowledge protocol has optimal leakage-resilient property.

One of the Bitcoin's innovations is the Proof of Work puzzle (aka scratch-off puzzle) as a consensus protocol for anonymous networks without pre-established PKI. Bitcoins based on the Proof of Work puzzle have been harshly blamed today for problems such as energy wasted and not easily scalable. In this paper, we construct a novel Proof of Transcation(PoT) puzzle, and prove that PoT puzzle satisfies the basic construction conditions of scratch-off puzzle. We also show construction of PoTcoin as application. To reduce the network load we use sequential aggregate signature. PoTcoin has many advantage but not limited as strengthening the network topology, promoting currency circulation, anti-outsourcing computing and environment-friendly.

In this paper, we propose a post-quantum public-key encryption scheme whose security depends on a problem arising from a multivariate non-linear indeterminate equation. The security of lattice cryptosystems, which are considered to be the most promising candidate for a post-quantum cryptosystem, is based on the shortest vector problem or the closest vector problem in the discrete linear solution spaces of simultaneous equations. However, several improved attacks for the underlying problems have recently been developed by using approximation methods, which result in requiring longer key sizes. As a scheme to avoid such attacks, we propose a public-key encryption scheme based on the ``smallest'' solution problem in the non-linear solution spaces of multivariate indeterminate equations that was developed from the algebraic surface cryptosystem. Since no efficient algorithm to find such a smallest solution is currently known, we introduce a new computational assumption under which proposed scheme is proven to be secure in the sense of IND-CPA. Then, we perform computational experiments based on known attack methods and evaluate that the key size of our scheme under the linear condition. This paper is a revised version of the paper at SAC2017.

Physical layer attacks allow attackers to manipulate (spoof) ranging and positioning. These attacks had real world impact and allowed car thefts, executions of unauthorised payments and manipulation of navigation. UWB impulse radio (UWB-IR) has emerged as a prominent technique for precise ranging that allows high operating distances despite power constraints by transmitting multi-pulse symbols. Unfortunately, longer symbols make UWB-IR vulnerable to physical layer attacks. Currently, none of the existing systems is precise, performant and secure at the same time. We present UWB with Pulse Reordering (UWB-PR), the first modulation scheme that secures distance measurement between two mutually trusted devices against all physical-layer attacks without sacrificing performance and irrespective of the environment or attacker. We analyze the security of UWB-PR under the attacker that fully controls the communication channel and show that UWB-PR resists even such a strong attacker. We evaluate UWB-PR within an UWB system building on IEEE 802.15.4f and show that it achieves distances of up to 93m with 10cm precision (LoS).

About Us

At Cloudflare, we have our eyes set on an ambitious goal: to help build a better Internet. Today, Cloudflare runs one of the world’s largest distributed networks that powers more than 1.5 trillion page views each month across 5 million Internet properties. More than 10 percent of all global Internet requests flow through Cloudflare’s network. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code.

Responsibilities

The Cryptography team is focused on solving difficult problems in security, performance, and privacy at scale using cryptographic tools. This involves systems engineering, open source software development, protocol design, the implementation of cryptographic primitives, contributions to cutting-edge research in collaboration with academia, participation in Internet standards organizations like the IETF, and more.

We are looking for systems engineers, programmers and researchers with a broad background and a specialization in cryptography to work on our team. Experience in Go, C and/or Lua is required, experience with x86/amd64 assembly is preferred.

Requirements

Currently in a M.S. or Ph.D. Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience.

Advance knowledge of networking protocols - TCP/IP, DNS, BGP, QUIC etc.

In-depth knowledge of authentication protocols, applied cryptography, PKI and SSL/TLS

Proficiency in the following languages - Go, C and/or Lua

Proven track record of independently driving projects in a fast-paced environment

Excellent communication skills on both technical and non-technical issues

Bonus Points:

Substantial contributions to cryptography software such as OpenSSL or Go\'s crypto/tls

Experience with high throughput/low latency real-time systems and/or content delivery networks

Closing date for applications: 31 December 2018

More information: https://boards.greenhouse.io/cloudflare/jobs/608495#.Wjw-yBNSwws

We introduce the abstract framework of decentralized smart contracts system with balance and transaction amount hiding property under the ACCOUNT architecture. To build a concrete system with such properties, we utilize a homomorphic public key encryption scheme and construct a highly efficient non-interactive zero knowledge (NIZK) argument based upon the encryption scheme to ensure the validity of the transactions. Our NIZK scheme is perfect zero knowledge in the common reference string model, while its soundness holds in the random oracle model. Compared to previous similar constructions, our proposed NIZK argument dramatically improves the time efficiency in generating a proof, at the cost of relatively longer proof size.

Database-as-a-service (DBaaS) allows the client to store and manage structured data on the cloud remotely. Despite its merits, DBaaS also brings significant privacy issues. Existing encryption techniques (e.g., SQL-aware encryption) can mitigate privacy concerns, but they still leak information through access patterns which are vulnerable to statistical inference attacks. Oblivious Random Access Machine (ORAM) can seal such leakages, but the recent studies showed significant challenges on the integration of ORAM into databases. Specifically, the direct usage of ORAM on databases is not only costly but also permits very limited query functionalities.

We propose new oblivious data structures called Oblivious Matrix Structure (OMAT) and Oblivious Tree Structure (OTREE), which allow tree-based ORAM to be integrated into database systems in a more efficient manner with diverse query functionalities supported. OMAT provides special ORAM packaging strategies for table structures, which not only offers a significantly better performance but also enables a broad range of query types that may not be practical in existing frameworks. OTREE allows oblivious conditional queries to be deployed on tree-indexed databases more efficient than existing techniques. We fully implemented our proposed techniques and evaluated their performance on a real cloud database with various metrics, compared with state-of-the-art counterparts.

Searchable encryption has received a significant attention from the research community with various constructions being proposed, each achieving asymptotically optimal complexity for specific metrics (e.g., search, update). Despite their elegancy, the recent attacks and deployment efforts have shown that the optimal asymptotic complexity might not always imply practical performance, especially if the application demands a high privacy. Hence, there is a significant need for searchable encryption frameworks that capture the recent attacks with actual deployments on cloud infrastructures to assess the practicality under realistic settings.

In this article, we introduce a new Dynamic Searchable Symmetric Encryption (DSSE) framework called Incidence Matrix (IM)-DSSE, which achieves a high level of privacy, efficient search/update, and low client storage with actual deployments on real cloud settings. We harness an incidence matrix along with two hash tables to create an encrypted index, on which both search and update operations can be performed effectively with minimal information leakage. This simple set of data structures surprisingly offers a high level of DSSE security while at the same time achieving practical performance. Specifically, IM-DSSE achieves forward privacy, backward privacy and size-obliviousness properties simultaneously. We also create several DSSE variants, each offering different trade-offs (e.g., security, computation) that are suitable for different cloud applications and infrastructures. Our framework was fully-implemented and its performance was rigorously evaluated on a real cloud system (Amazon EC2). Our experimental results confirm that IM-DSSE is highly practical even when deployed on mobile phones with a large outsourced dataset. Finally, we have released our IM-DSSE framework as an open-source library for a wide development and adaptation.

In August 2015 the cryptographic world was shaken by a sudden and surprising announcement by the US National Security Agency (NSA) concerning plans to transition to post-quantum algorithms. Since this announcement post-quantum cryptography has become a topic of primary interest for several standardization bodies. The transition from the currently deployed public-key algorithms to post-quantum algorithms has been found to be challenging in many aspects. In particular the problem of evaluating the quantum-bit security of such post-quantum cryptosystems remains vastly open. Of course this question is of primarily concern in the process of standardizing the post-quantum cryptosystems. In this paper we consider the quantum security of the problem of solving a system of $m$ Boolean multivariate quadratic equations in $n$ variables (MQ$_2$); a central problem in post-quantum cryptography. When $n=m$, under a natural algebraic assumption, we present a Las-Vegas quantum algorithm solving MQ$_2$ that requires the evaluation of, on average, $O(2^{0.462n})$ quantum gates. To our knowledge this is the fastest algorithm for solving MQ$_2$.

We propose a lattice-based electronic voting scheme, EVOLVE (Electronic Voting from Lattices with Verification), which is conjectured to resist attacks by quantum computers. Our protocol involves a number of voting authorities so that vote privacy is maintained as long as at least one of the authorities is honest, while the integrity of the result is guaranteed even when all authorities collude. Furthermore, the result of the vote can be independently computed by any observer. At the core of the protocol is the utilization of a homomorphic commitment scheme with strategically orchestrated zero-knowledge proofs: voters use approximate but efficient “Fiat-Shamir with Aborts” proofs to show the validity of their vote, while the authorities use amortized exact proofs to show that the commitments are well-formed. We also present a novel efficient zero-knowledge proof that one of two lattice-based statements is true (so-called OR proof) and a new mechanism to control the size of the randomness when applying the homomorphism to commitments. We give concrete parameter choices to securely instantiate and evaluate the efficiency of our scheme. Our prototype implementation shows that the voters require 8 milliseconds to submit a vote of size about 20KB to each authority and it takes each authority 0.15 seconds per voter to create a proof that his vote was valid. The size of the vote share that each authority produces is approximately 15KB per voter, which we believe is well within the practical bounds for a large-scale election.

We propose a novel multi-party computation protocol for evaluating continuous real-valued functions with high numerical precision. Our method is based on approximations with Fourier series and uses at most two rounds of communication during the online phase. For the offline phase, we propose a trusted-dealer and honest-but-curious aided solution, respectively. We apply our algorithm to train a logistic regression classifier via a variant of Newton's method (known as IRLS) to compute unbalanced classification problems that detect rare events and cannot be solved using previously proposed privacy-preserving optimization algorithms (e.g., based on piecewise-linear approximations of the sigmoid function). Our protocol is efficient as it can be implemented using standard quadruple-precision floating point arithmetic. We report multiple experiments and provide a demo application that implements our algorithm for training a logistic regression model.

Software-based countermeasures provide effective mitigation against side-channel attacks, often with minimal efficiency and deployment overheads. Their effectiveness is often amenable to rigorous analysis: specifically, several popular countermeasures can be formalized as information flow policies, and correct implementation of the countermeasures can be verified with state-of-the-art analysis and verification techniques. However, in absence of further justification, the guarantees only hold for the language (source, target, or intermediate representation) on which the analysis is performed.

We consider the problem of preserving side-channel countermeasures by compilation, and present a general method for proving that compilation preserves software-based side-channel countermeasures. The crux of our method is the notion of 2-simulation, which adapts to our setting the notion of simulation from compiler verification. Using the Coq proof assistant, we verify the correctness of our method and of several representative instantiations.

We review the problem of finding the optimal information ratios of graph access structures on six participants. Study of such access structures were initiated by van Dijk [Des. Codes Cryptogr. 15 (1998), 301-321].Through a sequence of follow up works, exact values of optimal information ratios of nine access structures, out of 18 initially unsolved non-isomorphic ones, were determined. Very recently [O. Farras et al. Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2017/919], for each of the remained such cases, the known lower bound on the optimal information ratio of linear secret sharing schemes was improved, establishing the optimal information ratio of linear secret sharing schemes for two of them. Here, for each of the other seven cases, we provide a new upper bound on the optimal information ratio of linear secret sharing schemes; our improved upper bounds match the corresponding recently presented lower bounds. Improved upper bounds are achieved using decomposition techniques. As an additional contribution, we present a new decomposition technique, called $(\lambda,\omega)$-weighted decomposition, which is a generalization of all known decomposition techniques.

In [AJPS17], Aggarwal, Joux, Prakash & Santha described an elegant public-key cryptosystem (AJPS-1) mimicking NTRU over the integers. This algorithm relies on the properties of Mersenne primes instead of polynomial rings. A later ePrint [BCGN17] by Beunardeau et al. revised AJPS-1’s initial security estimates. While lower than initially thought, the best known attack on AJPS-1 still seems to leave the defender with an exponential advantage over the attacker [dBDJdW17]. However, this lower exponential advantage implies enlarging AJPS-1’s parameters. This, plus the fact that AJPS-1 encodes only a single plaintext bit per ciphertext, made AJPS-1 impractical. In a recent update, Aggarwal et al. overcame this limitation by extending AJPS-1’s bandwidth. This variant (AJPS-ECC) modifies the definition of the public-key and relies on error-correcting codes. This paper presents a different high-bandwidth construction. By opposition to AJPS-ECC, we do not modify the public-key, avoid using errorcorrecting codes and use backtracking to decrypt. The new algorithm is orthogonal to AJPS-ECC as both mechanisms may be concurrently used in the same ciphertext and cumulate their bandwidth improvement effects. Alternatively, we can increase AJPS-ECC’s information rate by a factor of 26 for the parameters recommended in [AJPS17]. The obtained bandwidth improvement and the fact that encryption and decryption are reasonably efficient, make our scheme an interesting postquantum candidate.

SPDZ denotes a multiparty computation scheme in the preprocessing model based on somewhat homomorphic encryption (SHE) in the form of BGV. At CCS '16, Keller et al. presented MASCOT, a replacement of the preprocessing phase using oblivious transfer instead of SHE, improving by two orders of magnitude on the SPDZ implementation by Damgård et al. (ESORICS '13). In this work, we show that using SHE is faster than MASCOT in many aspects:

- We present a protocol that uses semi-homomorphic (addition-only) encryption. For two parties, our BGV-based implementation is 6 times faster than MASCOT on a LAN and 20 times faster in a WAN setting. The latter is roughly the reduction in communication.

- We show that using the proof of knowledge in the original work by Damgård et al. (Crypto '12) is more efficient in practice than the one used in the implementation mentioned above by about one order of magnitude.

- We present an improvement to the verification of the aforementioned proof of knowledge that increases the performance with a growing number of parties, doubling it for 16 parties.