IACR News
Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:
22 September 2018
Stephan Krenn, Kai Samelin, Dieter Sommer
Saint-Jacut-de-la-Mer, FRANCE, 31 March - 5 April 2019
Submission deadline: 14 December 2018
Notification: 8 February 2019
21 September 2018
Brussels, Belgium, 10 December - 11 December 2018
Submission deadline: 1 October 2018
Notification: 5 November 2018
Cryptographic Engineering Research Group at George Mason University, U.S.A
Cryptographic Engineering Research Group (CERG) at George Mason University, U.S.A., is seeking qualified candidates for multiple Ph.D. students / Graduate Research Assistants in the area of efficient implementations of Post-Quantum Cryptosystems, side-channel attacks targeting these cryptosystems, and countermeasures against such attacks.
The desired qualifications include
- strong mathematical background in algebra and number theory,
- experience in hardware design using hardware description languages, and
- knowledge of C and scripting languages, such as Python.
Additional experience in
- Magma or SageMath,
- ASIC or FPGA design,
- software/hardware codesign,
- High-Level Synthesis,
- embedded software development, and/or
- Linux operating system
is a plus.
The position is open starting in January 2019. Qualified candidates should apply to the ECE Ph.D. program at George Mason University by October 15, 2018. In parallel, an earlier e-mail contact with Dr. Gaj and/or Dr. Kaps is highly recommended.
Closing date for applications: 15 October 2018
Contact: Dr. Kris Gaj, Professor, kgaj (at) gmu.edu, and/or Dr. Jens-Peter Kaps, Associate Professor, jkaps (at) gmu.edu, ECE Department, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA, U.S.A.
More information: https://cryptography.gmu.edu
Cryptographic Engineering Research Group at George Mason University, U.S.A
Cryptographic Engineering Research Group (CERG) at George Mason University, U.S.A., is seeking qualified candidates for a Ph.D. student / Graduate Research Assistant in the area of efficient and secure implementations of Lightweight Cryptography.
The desired qualifications include experience in
- embedded systems,
- knowledge of C, assembly, and scripting languages,
- hardware design using hardware description languages,
- Linux operating system, and
- strong experimental skills.
Additional experience in
- side-channel and/or fault attacks,
- countermeasures against these attacks,
- ASIC or FPGA design,
- software/hardware codesign,
- embedded software development, and/or
- circuit/PCB design
is a plus.
Closing date for applications: 15 October 2018
Contact: Dr. Jens-Peter Kaps, Associate Professor, jkaps (at) gmu.edu and/or Dr. Kris Gaj, Professor, kgaj (at) gmu.edu, ECE Department, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA, U.S.A.
More information: https://cryptography.gmu.edu
University of Wollongong, Australia
This PhD studentship is partly funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery project. The successful candidate will be awarded a PhD scholarship and stipend for the duration of 3 years, with a possible extension for an additional 6 months to complete the PhD thesis.
A successful candidate will be supervised by the Chief Investigators of this project: Prof. Willy Susilo and Dr. Joonsang Baek.
Interested candidates should provide a complete CV highlighting research experience, complete transcript (in English) for Bachelor and Master degrees and a research proposal. The successful candidate is expected to start in March 2019.
Application should be submitted to Dr. Joonsang Baek via email: baek (at) uow.edu.au
More Information on ic2 can be obtained from: https://eis.uow.edu.au/scit/institute-cybersecurity-cryptology/index.html
Closing date for applications: 20 October 2018
ENS de Lyon
The post-doc will work with the cryptography researchers of ENS de Lyon on topics in lattice-based cryptography. This post is part of the EU H2020 PROMETHEUS project for building quantum-safe privacy-preserving systems. Our focus within this project is on primitive/protocol design. Applicants with a background in other areas are also welcome to apply but some familiarity with zero-knowledge proofs is expected.
Applicants should have already completed a PhD in a relevant area. They should have an outstanding research track record in cryptography. They should demonstrate scientific creativity and research independence.
This is a full-time, fixed-term position based in Lyon.
Applications should be sent by email to benoit[dot]libert[at]ens-lyon[dot]fr, damien[dot]stehle[at]gmail[dot]com and fabien[dot]laguillaumie[at]ens-lyon[dot]fr. They should include a CV, a list of publications (with the top 3 ones highlighted) and contact information of two persons who are willing to give references.
Closing date for applications: 28 February 2019
Contact: Benoît Libert (benoit[dot]libert[at]ens-lyon[dot]fr)
More information: http://prometheuscrypt.gforge.inria.fr/
QUADRAC Co., Ltd., Tokyo, Japan
Their roles include own products’ R&D, technical lead, support et al., with the followings: implementation of security protocol with cryptography and authentication, its evaluation and tests, and software developments of security management technologies.
If you are interested in work in Japan with us in our office (in Nogizaka, Tokyo), please contact.
Japanese fluency (incl. your target) is welcome.
Step forward to work together with our skillful colleagues to new innovative product development.
QUADRAC’s business includes self-development and sales of retail transaction server, and R&D about closed-coupled communication technology.
FeliCa(NFC) core developer and skillful colleagues started a business together in 2009.
We are eager to serve people globally a happy, pleasant, convenient new life style with technology innovation, as it has been, from now on.
http://www.quadrac.co.jp/en-index
Closing date for applications: 18 March 2019
Contact: Please contact: send CV to hirohisa.iijima [at] quadrac.co.jp
Graz University of Technology
To increase the proportion of female academic personnel in the position of professor at Graz University of Technology, the Faculty of Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering is seeking to fill a tenure track professorship for the field of Cryptography for women.
The position, is initially restricted to six years as a University Assistant with Doctorate, 40 hours per week and the successful candidate is expected to start on 01.04.2019, at the Institute of Applied Information Processing and Communications.
Upon agreement on a qualification agreement, the candidate will be appointed as assistant professor. As soon as the qualification agreement has been fulfilled, the position will be converted into a tenured position as associate professor.
Closing date for applications: 3 December 2018
Contact: Stefan Mangard, Email: Stefan.Mangard (at) iaik.tugraz.at
More information: https://www.tugraz.at/fakultaeten/infbio/news/vacancies/tenure-track-professor-in-cryptography-women-only/
20 September 2018
Xingye Lu, Man Ho Au, Zhenfei Zhang
Shi Bai, Damien Stehlé, Weiqiang Wen
In this work, we first report experiments providing more insight on this shorter-than-expected phenomenon. We then propose a refined BKZ simulator by taking the distribution of short vectors in random lattices into consideration. We report experiments suggesting that this refined simulator more accurately predicts the concrete behavior of BKZ. Furthermore, we design a new BKZ variant that exploits the shorter-than-expected phenomenon. For the same cost assigned to the underlying SVP-solver, the new BKZ variant produces bases of better quality. We further illustrate its potential impact by testing it on the SVP-120 instance of the Darmstadt lattice challenge.
Tibor Jager, Saqib A. Kakvi, Alexander May
We introduce a new technique that enables the first security proof for RSA-PKCS#1 v1.5 signatures. We prove full existential unforgeability against adaptive chosen-message attacks (EUF-CMA) under the standard RSA assumption. Furthermore, we give a tight proof under the Phi-Hiding assumption. These proofs are in the random oracle model and the parameters deviate slightly from the standard use, because we require a larger output length of the hash function. However, we also show how RSA-PKCS#1 v1.5 signatures can be instantiated in practice such that our security proofs apply.
In order to draw a more complete picture of the precise security of RSA PKCS#1 v1.5 signatures, we also give security proofs in the standard model, but with respect to weaker attacker models (key-only attacks) and based on known complexity assumptions. The main conclusion of our work is that from a provable security perspective RSA PKCS#1 v1.5 can be safely used, if the output length of the hash function is chosen appropriately.
Saeed Mahloujifar, Mahammad Mahmoody, Ameer Mohammed
In this work, we initiate a formal study of $(k,p)$-poisoning attacks in which an adversary controls $k\in[n]$ of the parties, and even for each corrupted party $P_i$, the adversary submits some poisoned data $T'_i$ on behalf of $P_i$ that is still "$(1-p)$-close" to the correct data $T_i$ (e.g., $1-p$ fraction of $T'_i$ is still honestly generated). For $k=m$, this model becomes the traditional notion of poisoning, and for $p=1$ it coincides with the standard notion of corruption in multi-party computation.
We prove that if there is an initial constant error for the generated hypothesis $h$, there is always a $(k,p)$-poisoning attacker who can decrease the confidence of $h$ (to have a small error), or alternatively increase the error of $h$, by $\Omega(p \cdot k/m)$. Our attacks can be implemented in polynomial time given samples from the correct data, and they use no wrong labels if the original distributions are not noisy.
At a technical level, we prove a general lemma about biasing bounded functions $f(x_1,\dots,x_n)\in[0,1]$ through an attack model in which each block $x_i$ might be controlled by an adversary with marginal probability $p$ in an online way. When the probabilities are independent, this coincides with the model of $p$-tampering attacks, thus we call our model generalized $p$-tampering. We prove the power of such attacks by incorporating ideas from the context of coin-flipping attacks into the $p$-tampering model and generalize the results in both of these areas.
Christos Patsonakis, Katerina Samari , Mema Roussopoulos , Aggelos Kiayias
In our work, we leverage the scalability, as well as, the built-in incentive mechanism of blockchain systems and propose a smart contract-based DPKI. The main barrier in realizing a smart contract-based DPKI is the size of the contract's state which, being its most expensive resource to access, should be minimized for a construction to be viable. We resolve this problem by proposing and using in our DPKI a public-state cryptographic accumulator with constant size, a cryptographic tool which may be of independent interest in the context of blockchain protocols. We also are the first to formalize the DPKI design problem in the Universal Composability (UC) framework and formally prove the security of our construction under the strong RSA assumption in the Random Oracle model and the existence of an ideal smart contract functionality.
Christoph Dobraunig, Stefan Mangard, Florian Mendel, Robert Primas
T-H. Hubert Chan, Jonathan Katz, Kartik Nayak, Antigoni Polychroniadou, Elaine Shi
In this work, we construct a perfectly secure 3-server ORAM scheme that outperforms the best known single-server scheme by a logarithmic factor. In the process we also show, for the first time, that there exist specific algorithms for which multiple servers can overcome known lower bounds in the single-server setting.
19 September 2018
University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
The Department has a large secure systems research group, led by Professor Steve Schneider, with expertise in security by design, authentication, verification, distributed ledger technologies, trusted systems and cloud security.
This post offers an exciting opportunity for an appointment in the Secure Systems group. Suitable areas of expertise that complement and extend strengths of the group include (but are not limited to): practical system security, trusted systems, verification, distributed systems, complex systems and networks, and the interface between security and machine learning.
The University and the Department specifically are committed to building a culturally diverse organisation and strongly encourages applications from female, minority candidates and industry experts.
Interested candidates will find details of these posts at: https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?id=5405&forced=1
Closing date 21 October 2018.
Interviews 5 and 6 November 2018.
For an informal discussion about the position, please contact the Head of Department of Computer Science, Dr Helen Treharne on h.treharne (at) surrey.ac.uk, Professor Steve Schneider or Professor Liqun Chen ( s.schneider (at) surrey.ac.uk, liqun.chen (at) surrey.ac.uk ).
Closing date for applications: 21 October 2018
Contact:
- Dr Helen Treharne (h.treharne (at) surrey.ac.uk),
- Professor Steve Schneider (s.schneider (at) surrey.ac.uk), or
- Professor Liqun Chen (liqun.chen (at) surrey.ac.uk)
More information: https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?id=5405&forced=1
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Barcelona, Spain)
http://prometheuscrypt.gforge.inria.fr/
Specifically, to design/analyze/implement better lattice-based cryptographic protocols that may be needed in electronic voting applications; this includes encryption, (group, blind) signatures and zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge.
The candidate (with a phD. completed or close to be completed) should therefore have experience in the area of lattice-based cryptography.
The expected salary will be around 43.000 euros per year, before taxes are applied (which may mean around 30.000 euros per year, at the end). The work place will be in UPC Campus Nord (Barcelona). The contract would start at some point in 2019, and could last 1-2 years.
Closing date for applications: 30 November 2018
Contact: Interested candidates can send an e-mail to Javier Herranz (javier.herranz (at) upc.edu) with a CV.
University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, UK
The Department has a large secure systems research group, led by Professor Steve Schneider, with expertise in security by design, authentication, verification, distributed ledger technologies, trusted systems and cloud security.
This post offers an exciting opportunity for an appointment in the Secure Systems group. Suitable areas of expertise that complement and extend strengths of the group include (but are not limited to): practical system security, trusted systems, verification, distributed systems, complex systems and networks, and the interface between security and machine learning.
The University and the Department specifically are committed to building a culturally diverse organisation and strongly encourages applications from female, minority candidates and industry experts.
For an informal discussion about the position, please contact the Head of Department of Computer Science, Dr Helen Treharne on h.treharne (at) surrey.ac.uk, Professor Steve Schneider or Professor Liqun Chen (s.schneider (at) surrey.ac.uk, liqun.chen (at) surrey.ac.uk).
Closing date for applications: 21 October 2018
Contact:
Dr Helen Treharne, Head of Department of Computer Science, h.treharne (at) surrey.ac.uk
Prof Steve Schneider, Director of Surrey Centre for Cyber Security, s.schneider (at) surrey.ac.uk
Prof Liqun Chen, Professor of Secure Systems, liqun.chen (at) surrey.ac.uk
More information: https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?id=5405
King Khaled University. Abha, Saudi Arabia
time positions of Professor, Associate Professor and Assistant Professor in the following
fields:
Network Security
IoT Security
cloud Security
Cryptography
Hardware Security
Salary:
The University offers a competitive salary based on qualification, professional
experience, and the position offered, as follows:
Professor: $52,500 - $88,500 per annum.
Associate professor: $43,000- $73,000 per annum.
Assistant professor: $35,500 - $60,000 per annum.
Common Benefits:
Free visa.
Around 1-week vacation on each Islamic Eid.
60-days annually paid vacation.
Annual air tickets for up to 4 family members to home country.
Free Medical Services for all family members at all government hospitals.
Children Education Allowance (Terms and Conditions apply).
Annual housing allowance (Terms and Conditions apply).
Furniture allowance upon arrival (Terms and Conditions apply).
Weekends (Friday and Saturday) are off.
Closing date for applications: 31 December 2018
Contact: ccs (at) kku.edu.sa
More information: http://www.cs.kku.edu.sa/en