International Association
for Cryptologic Research

In this short note, we address a common misconception at the interface of probability theory and public-key cryptography.

We show it is possible to build an RSA-type cryptosystem by utilizing probable primes to base 2 numbers. Our modulus N is the product nm of such numbers (so here both prime and some composite, e.g. Carmichael or Fermat, numbers are acceptable) instead of prime numbers. Moreover, we require for n and m to be distinct only, not necessarily coprime, and so we don't have to worry about whether any of the numbers n,m is composite or not. The encryption and decryption processes are similar as those in the RSA. Hence, in this cryptosystem we may apply the above kind of numbers of arbitrary length being still sure that the system works well. The price for that is the size of words permitted by the new system: any message M, as a number, must be smaller than log (in base 2) of nm.

The IACR and PKC Steering Committee are pleased to announce the 2020 Test-of-Time award for papers published PKC.

PKC is the International Conference on Practice and Theory in Public Key Cryptography, which was founded in 1998 and became an official IACR event in 2003. The Test-of-Time award recognizes outstanding papers, published in PKC about 15 years ago, making a significant contribution to the theory and practice of public key cryptography, preferably with influence either on foundations or on the practice of the field.

The 2020 award will be given on Wednesday June 3rd at PKC in a virtual Award Ceremony, for papers published in the conference's initial years of early 2000s and late 1990s. In the first few years a number of papers from a few different initial years of PKC can be recognized. Thereafter, the award will typically recognize one year at a time with one or two papers.

The recipients of the 2020 award are:

• On the Security of ElGamal Based Encryption , by Yiannis Tsiounis, and Moti Yung, PKC 1998.
• A Generalisation, a Simplification and Some Applications of Paillier's Probabilistic Public-Key System, by Ivan Damgård, and Mads Jurik, PKC 2001.
• Threshold Signatures , Multisignatures and Blind Signatures based on the Gap-Diffie-Hellman-Group Signature Scheme, by Alexandra Boldyreva, PKC 2003.

Congratulations to these authors for their impactful work! More information about the award can be found at https://iacr.org/meetings/pkc/test_of_time_award/

Event date: 17 September to 19 September 2020
Submission deadline: 10 June 2020

Event date: to
Submission deadline: 1 June 2021
Notification: 1 July 2021

(Yes ! We are still hiring despite COVID-19)

The Cryptanalysis Taskforce at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore led by Prof. Jian Guo is seeking for candidates to fill 3 postdoctoral research fellow positions on symmetric-key cryptography, including but not limited to the following sub-areas:

• privacy-preserving friendly symmetric-key designs
• tool aided cryptanalysis, such as MILP, CP, STP, and SAT
• machine learning aided cryptanalysis and designs
• quantum cryptanalysis
• cryptanalysis against SHA-3 and AES

Established in 2014, the Cryptanalysis Taskforce is a group dedicated for research in symmetric-key cryptography. Since then, the team has been active in both publications in and services for IACR. It has done quite some cryptanalysis work on various important targets such as SHA-3, and is expanding its interests to the areas mentioned above, with strong funding support from the university and government agencies in Singapore. We offer competitive salary package with extremely low tax, as well as an environment dedicated for research in Singapore. The contract will be initially for 2 years, and has the possibility to be extended. Candidates are expected to have proven record of publications in IACR conferences. Interested candidates are to send their CV and 2 reference letters to Jian Guo. Review of applicants will start immediately until the positions are filled. More information about the Cryptanalysis Taskforce research group can be found via http://team.crypto.sg

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Asst Prof. Jian Guo, guojian@ntu.edu.sg

Applications are invited for a post-doc position at Carnegie Mellon University. The specific topic of the research is flexible and will be determined based on the common interests. Samples areas include secure multi-party computation, zero-knowledge proofs, post-quantum/lattice-based cryptography, and non-malleable cryptography. Must have a strong track record of publications in top crypto conferences.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Vipul Goyal (vipul at cmu.edu)

More information: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~goyal/

The CryptoLux group of the University of Luxembourg has a vacancy for a post-doctoral researcher in the area of symmetric cryptography. The successful candidate will contribute to a research project entitled "Analysis and Protection of Lightweight Cryptographic Algorithms (APLICA)", which is funded by the Luxembourgish Fonds National de la Recherche and the German Research Foundation. Starting in Fall 2020, APLICA will run over a period of 3 years as a joint research project between the CryptoLux group and the Workgroup for Symmetric Cryptography of Ruhr-University Bochum. The mission of the APLICA project is to develop new cryptanalytic techniques for lightweight authenticated encryption algorithms and hash functions, and to design and implement new countermeasures against side-channel attacks that are suitable for constrained devices.

Candidates must have a Ph.D. degree in symmetric cryptography or a closely related field. Preference will be given to candidates with a strong publication record that includes at least one paper at an IACR-sponsored conference/workshop or one of the top-4 security conferences. Experience in software development for embedded systems or mounting side-channel attacks is a plus. Candidates with an interest to conduct research in one of the following areas are particularly encouraged to apply:

• Cryptanalysis of authenticated encryption algorithms or hash functions
• Leakage resilience or leakage reduction by design (e.g. modes of operation)
• Security evaluation of leakage-resilient primitives or constructions

The position is available from Sept. 2020 on basis of a fixed-term contract for 3 years, which includes a probation period of 6 months. The University of Luxembourg offers excellent working conditions and a highly competitive salary. Interested candidates are invited to send their application by email to Alex Biryukov before June 15, 2020. The application material should contain a cover letter explaining the candidate's research interests, a detailed CV (including photo), a list of publications, scans of diploma certificates, and the names and contact details of 3 referenc

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Prof. Alex Biryukov (alex.biryukov@uni.lu)

More information: https://www.fnr.lu/projects/analysis-and-protection-of-lightweight-cryptographic-algorithms/

Private Set Intersection (PSI) enables two parties, each holding a private set to securely compute their intersection without revealing other information. This paper considers settings of secure statistical computations over PSI, where both parties hold sets containing identifiers with one of the parties having an additional positive integer value associated with each of the identifiers in her set. The main objective is to securely compute some desired statistics of the associated values for which its corresponding identifiers occur in the intersection of the two sets. This is achieved without revealing the identifiers of the set intersection. This has many useful business applications, for examples in measuring effectiveness of advertising campaigns. In many cases, the parties wish to know various statistical information with regards to the set intersection and the associated integer values. For instance, information relating to arithmetic mean, geometric mean, harmonic mean, standard deviation, minimum, maximum, range or an approximate distribution of the sum composition. A potential use case is for a credit card company to provide the percentage of high spending to a shopping mall based on their common customers. Therefore, in this paper we introduce various mechanisms to enable secure computation of statistical functions, which we collectively termed PSI-Stats. The proposed protocols maintain strong privacy guarantee, that is computations are performed without revealing the identifiers of the set intersection to both parties. Implementations of our constructions are also carried out based on a simulated dataset as well as on actual datasets in the business use cases that we defined, in order to demonstrate practicality of our solution. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first non-circuit-based type which enables parties to learn more about the set intersection via secure computations over a wide variety of statistical functions, without requiring the machinery of fully homomorphic encryption.

Updatable encryption schemes allow for key rotation on ciphertexts. A client outsourcing storage of encrypted data to a cloud server can change its encryption key. The cloud server can update the stored ciphertexts to the new key using only a token provided by the client.

This paper solves two open problems in updatable encryption, that of uni-directional vs. bi-directional updates, and post-quantum security.

The main result in this paper is to analyze the security notions based on uni- and bi-directional updates. Surprisingly, we prove that uni- and bi-directional variants of each security notion are equivalent.

The second result in this paper is to provide a new and highly efficient updatable encryption scheme based on the Decisional Learning with Error assumption. This gives us post-quantum security. Our scheme is bi-directional, but because of our main result, this is sufficient.

The Institute for Computer Architecture and Computer Engineering (ITI) at the University of Stuttgart seeks applications for a research position for the recently approved DFG project MEMCRYPTO in the field of memristor-based cryptography. The objective of the project is to explore novel memristive devices and architectures on their basis for construction of secure cryptographic hardware blocks, such as block ciphers. The project, which is part of DFG’s new Priority Program “Nano Security” (SPP 2253), will involve a tight collaboration with a research group in material science at TU Chemnitz capable of manufacturing and testing memristive devices and circuits. The position is suitable for PhD candidates, yet interested candidates who already hold a PhD degree can be employed as well. Located in Stuttgart, one of Europe’s main economic hubs, the Institute offers you an inspiring working atmosphere in a successful international team. The remuneration is according to the German public-service salary grade TV-L E13. Part-time employment, or a combination with a teaching-assistant position associated with a teaching load, are possible. To qualify for this position, you need an above-average Master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or a related discipline. Moreover, we expect proven skills or experiences in at least one of the three areas listed below (and credible interest in the other two): 1. Design of digital circuits, including their specification in Verilog or VHDL, synthesis for ASIC or FPGA, simulation on different levels of abstraction. 2. Cryptography, ideally with a focus on resilience of cryptographic implementations against physical attacks (side-channel analysis, fault-injections). 3. Memristive technologies, e.g., modeling or simulation of memristive behavior, synthesis of circuits in memristive logic families. To apply, please send, by email, your cover letter (explicitly explaining your interest in the topic and pointing out which of the three above-mentioned areas you feel competent in), CV and scans of your Master’s and Bachelor’s degree certificates including the transcripts with all grades.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Ilia Polian

More information: https://spp-nanosecurity.uni-stuttgart.de/projects/

The concept of quantum bit commitment was introduced in the early 1980s for the purpose of basing bit commitment solely on principles of quantum theory. Unfortunately, such unconditional quantum bit commitment still turns out to be impossible. As a compromise like in classical cryptography, Dumais, Mayers and Salvail [DMS00] introduce and realize the conditional quantum bit commitment that additionally relies on complexity assumptions. However, in contrast to the classical bit commitment which is widely used in classical cryptography, up until now there is relatively little work towards studying the application of quantum bit commitment in quantum cryptography. This may be partly due to the well-known weakness of the quantum binding, making it unclear whether quantum bit commitment could be used as a primitive (like its classical counterpart) in quantum cryptography.

As the first step towards studying the possible application of quantum bit commitment in quantum cryptography, in this work we consider replacing the classical bit commitment used in some well-known constructions with a perfectly/statistically-binding quantum bit commitment. We show that (quantum) security can still be fulfilled in particular with respect to zero-knowledge, oblivious transfer, and proofs-of-knowledge. In spite of this, we stress that the corresponding security analyses are by no means a trivial adaptation of their classical counterparts. New techniques are needed to handle possible superposition attacks by the cheating sender of the quantum bit commitments.

Since non-interactive quantum bit commitment schemes can be constructed from general quantum-secure one-way functions, we hope to use quantum bit commitment (rather than the classical one that is still quantum-secure) in cryptographic construction to reduce the round complexity and weaken the complexity assumption simultaneously.

Private set intersection and related functionalities are among the most prominent real-world applications of secure multiparty computation. While such protocols have attracted significant attention from the research community, other functionalities are often required to support a PSI application in practice. For example, in order for two parties to run a PSI over the unique users contained in their databases, they might first invoke on a support functionality to agree on the primary keys to represent their users. This paper studies a secure approach to agreeing on primary keys. We introduce and realize a functionality that computes a common set of identifiers based on incomplete information held by two parties, which we refer to as private identity agreement. We explain the subtleties in designing such a functionality that arise from privacy requirements when intending to compose securely with PSI protocols. We also argue that the cost of invoking this functionality can be amortized over a large number of PSI sessions, and that for applications that require many repeated PSI executions, this represents an improvement over a PSI protocol that directly uses incomplete or fuzzy matches.

We study the security of $\mathsf{CTR\text{-}DRBG}$, one of NIST's recommended Pseudorandom Number Generator (PRNG) designs. Recently, Woodage and Shumow (Eurocrypt' 19), and then Cohney et al. (S&P' 20) point out some potential vulnerabilities in both NIST specification and common implementations of $\mathsf{CTR\text{-}DRBG}$. While these researchers do suggest counter-measures, the security of the patched $\mathsf{CTR\text{-}DRBG}$ is still questionable. Our work fills this gap, proving that $\mathsf{CTR\text{-}DRBG}$ satisfies the robustness notion of Dodis et al. (CCS'13), the standard security goal for PRNGs.

Threshold encryption is encryption to a group of n intended recipients in such a way that any t+1 out of the n recipients together can decrypt, but t or fewer learn nothing about the message. Ad hoc threshold encryption (ATE) is threshold encryption with no trusted setup beyond a PKI (that is, all keys are generated independently). The techniques known in the ad hoc setting suffer either from ciphertexts linear in (n-t) (Daza et. al), or from reliance on cumbersome primitives like indistinguishability obfuscation (Reyzin et. al).

In this paper, we set out to determine whether we can get ATE with short ciphertexts from standard primitives. We therefore work in a model where we limit reliance on computational assumptions. We do this by demanding information theoretic security given black-box access to limited cryptographic tools such as non-interactive key exchange and pseudorandom generators.

We show that, with access only to idealized two-party key exchange, any secure ATE scheme must produce ciphertexts of size at least (n-t-1)l (where l is the length of the message). If access is additionally given to an idealized PRG, the lower bound on ciphertext size becomes k(n-t)/2 + l (where k is the length of the input to the PRG).

If idealized q-party key exchange for q > 2 is availabe, then we can achieve a constant-size ciphertext, at the cost of invoking the key exchange an exponential number of times. We also prove that, if the size of the ciphertext is optimal (that is, equal to the size of the message), the exponential overhead is unavoidable. Finally, we give some alternative constructions demonstrating that the overhead can be reduced at the cost of slightly larger ciphertext size.

A proof of replication system is a cryptographic primitive that allows a server (or group of servers) to prove to a client that it is dedicated to storing multiple copies or replicas of a file. Until recently, all such protocols required fined-grained timing assumptions on the amount of time it takes for a server to produce such replicas.

Damg{\aa}rd, Ganesh, and Orlandi (CRYPTO' 19) proposed a novel notion that we will call proof of replication with client setup. Here, a client first operates with secret coins to generate the replicas for a file. Such systems do not inherently have to require fine-grained timing assumptions. At the core of their solution to building proofs of replication with client setup is an abstraction called replica encodings. Briefly, these comprise a private coin scheme where a client algorithm given a file $m$ can produce an encoding $\sigma$. The encodings have the property that, given any encoding $\sigma$, one can decode and retrieve the original file $m$. Secondly, if a server has significantly less than $n \cdot |m|$ bit of storage, it cannot reproduce $n$ encodings. The authors give a construction of encodings from ideal permutations and trapdoor functions.

In this work, we make three central contributions: 1) Our first contribution is that we discover and demonstrate that the security argument put forth by DGO19 is fundamentally flawed. Briefly, the security argument makes assumptions on the attacker's storage behavior that does not capture general attacker strategies. We demonstrate this issue by constructing a trapdoor permutation which is secure assuming indistinguishability obfuscation, serves as a counterexample to their claim (for the parameterization stated). 2) In our second contribution we show that the DGO19 construction is actually secure in the ideal permutation model from any trapdoor permutation when parameterized correctly. In particular, when the number of rounds in the construction is equal to $\lambda \cdot n \cdot b$ where $\lambda$ is the security parameter, $n$ is the number of replicas and $b$ is the number of blocks. To do so we build up a proof approach from the ground up that accounts for general attacker storage behavior where we create an analysis technique that we call ``sequence-then-switch''. 3) Finally, we show a new construction that is provably secure in the random oracle (or random function) model. Thus requiring less structure on the ideal function.

Identity-based encryption (IBE) is a generalization of public-key encryption (PKE) by allowing encryptions to be made to user identities. In this work, we seek to obtain IBE schemes that achieve key-dependent-message (KDM) security with respect to messages that depend on the master secret key. Previous KDM-secure schemes only achieved KDM security in simpler settings, in which messages may only depend on user secret keys. An important motivation behind studying master-KDM security is the application of this notion in obtaining generic constructions of KDM-CCA secure PKE, a primitive notoriously difficult to realize. We give the first IBE that achieves master-KDM security from standard assumptions in pairing groups. Our construction is modular and combines techniques from KDM-secure PKE based from hash-proof systems, together with IBE that admits a tight security proof in the multi-challenge setting, which happens to be unexpectedly relevant in the context of KDM security. In fact, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first setting where techniques developed in the context of realizing tightly secure cryptosystems have led to a new feasibility result. As a byproduct, our KDM-secure IBE, and thus the resulting KDM-CCA-secure PKE both enjoy a tight security reduction, independent of the number of challenge ciphertexts, which was not achieved before.

Although it is one of the most popular signature schemes today, ECDSA presents a number of implementation pitfalls, in particular due to the very sensitive nature of the random value (known as the nonce) generated as part of the signing algorithm. It is known that any small amount of nonce exposure or nonce bias can in principle lead to a full key recovery: the key recovery is then a particular instance of Boneh and Venkatesan's hidden number problem (HNP). That observation has been practically exploited in many attacks in the literature, taking advantage of implementation defects or side-channel vulnerabilities in various concrete ECDSA implementations. However, most of the attacks so far have relied on at least 2 bits of nonce bias (except for the special case of curves at the $80$-bit security level, for which attacks against $1$-bit biases are known, albeit with a very high number of required signatures).

In this paper, we uncover LadderLeak, a novel class of side-channel vulnerabilities in implementations of the Montgomery ladder used in ECDSA scalar multiplication. The vulnerability is in particular present in several recent versions of OpenSSL. However, it leaks less than $1$ bit of information about the nonce, in the sense that it reveals the most significant bit of the nonce, but with probability $<1$. Exploiting such a mild leakage would be intractable using techniques present in the literature so far. However, we present a number of theoretical improvements of the Fourier analysis approach to solving the HNP (an approach originally due to Bleichenbacher), and this lets us practically break LadderLeak-vulnerable ECDSA implementations instantiated over the sect163r1 and NIST P-192 elliptic curves. In so doing, we achieve several significant computational records in practical attacks against the HNP.

Electronic cash (e-cash) was introduced 40 years ago as the digital analogue of traditional cash. It allows users to withdraw electronic coins that can be spent anonymously with merchants. As advocated by Camenisch et al. (Eurocrypt 2005), it should be possible to store the withdrawn coins compactly (i.e., with logarithmic cost in the total number of coins), which has led to the notion of compact e-cash. Many solutions were proposed for this problem but the security proofs of most of them were invalidated by a very recent paper by Bourse et al. (Asiacrypt 2019). The same paper describes a generic way of fixing existing constructions/proofs but concrete instantiations of this patch are currently unknown in some settings. In particular, compact e-cash is no longer known to exist under quantum-safe assumptions. In this work, we resolve this problem by proposing the first secure compact e-cash system based on lattices following the result from Bourse et al. Contrarily to the latter work, our construction is not only generic, but we describe two concrete instantiations. We depart from previous frameworks of e-cash systems by leveraging lossy trapdoor functions to construct our coins. The indistinguishability of lossy and injective keys allows us to avoid the very strong requirements on the involved pseudo-random functions that were necessary to instantiate the generic patch proposed by Bourse et al.

We propose two new supersingular isogeny-based public key encryptions: SiGamal and C-SiGamal. These public key encryptions are developed by giving an additional point of the order $2^r$ to CSIDH. SiGamal seems similar to ElGamal encryption, while C-SiGamal is a compressed version of SiGamal. We prove that SiGamal and C-SiGamal obtain IND-CPA security without using hash functions under a new assumption: the P-CSSDDH assumption. This assumption comes from the expectation that no efficient algorithm can distinguish between a random point and a point that is the image of a public point under a hidden isogeny.

Next, we propose a Naor-Reingold type pseudo random function based on SiGamal. If the P-CSSDDH assumption and the CSSDDH$^*$ assumption, which guarantees the security of CSIDH that uses a prime $p$ in the setting of SiGamal, hold, then our proposed function is a pseudo random function. Moreover, we estimate computational costs of group actions to compute our proposed PRF are about $\sqrt{\frac{8T}{3\pi}}$ times than that of the group action in CSIDH, where $T$ is the Hamming weight of input of the PRF.

Finally, we experimented group actions in SiGamal and C-SiGamal. In our experimentation, the computational costs of group actions in SiGamal-512 with a $256$-bit plaintext message space are about $2.62$ times that of a group action in CSIDH-512.