IACR News
Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:
03 September 2020
Adrian Marotzke
Carlos Aguilar-Melchor, Nicolas Aragon, Emanuele Bellini, Florian Caullery, Rusydi H. Makarim, Chiara Marcolla
Naila Mukhtar, Louiza Papachristodoulou, Apostolos P. Fournaris, Lejla Batina, Yinan Kong
Gary Yu
Karim Baghery, Alonso González, Zaira Pindado, Carla Ràfols
As an independent contribution we also detail a simple formula to encode Boolean circuits as Quadratic Arithmetic Programs.
Sergi Ramos-Calderer, Emanuele Bellini, José I. Latorre, Marc Manzano, Victor Mateu
Vahid Amin Ghafari, Fujiang Lin
Fuyuki Kitagawa, Takahiro Matsuda
Besides amplifying the strength of KDM security, our transformation in fact can start from an encryption scheme satisfying circular security against ¥emph{CPA} attacks and results in one satisfying bounded-KDM security against ¥emph{CCA} attacks. This result improves the recent result by Kitagawa and Matsuda (TCC 2019) showing a CPA-to-CCA transformation for KDM secure public-key encryption schemes.
02 September 2020
North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA
The project will explore the security aspects of hardware accelerators. The goal of this project is to identify efficient solutions for defending against a wide set of attacks (e.g., side-channel attacks) targeting hardware accelerators. We will also investigate different challenges and security concerns related to the programming models and run-time environments of particular interest to our funding agency. More information will be shared with the applicants.
PhD Applicants: Following are the minimum requirements for PhD applicants:
Post-Doc Applicants:
We are also hiring post-doctoral scholars to lead some of the efforts in this project. Post-Doc candidates should have PhD with focus on computer architecture or systems with familiarity with hardware accelerators (e.g., FPGA and GPUs). The positions are available immediately and thus candidates who are already in the US are preferred.
Links to research groups:
Prof. Awad: https://sacagroup.github.io/
Prof. Aysu: https://research.ece.ncsu.edu/aaysu/
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Amro Awad (ajawad@ncsu.edu) and Aydin Aysu (aaysu@ncsu.edu)
IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid, Spain
The IMDEA Software Institute offers a postdoc position in the area of cryptography, in the context of the project "Cryptographic Primitives for Randomness Generation and Privacy". The postdoc will work under the supervision of Dario Fiore and Ignacio Cascudo, in the following topics and their application to blockchain systems: Zero knowledge proofs, and Random beacon generation.
Who should apply? Applicants should have a PhD in cryptography or a related topic. Experience in the research topics of the projects is highly valued.
Working at IMDEA Software The position is based in Madrid, Spain, where the IMDEA Software Institute is situated. The institute provides for travel expenses and an internationally competitive salary. The working language at the institute is English.
Dates The position has guaranteed funding for at least 2 years. The preferred starting date is around the end of 2020, but starting dates in early 2021 are also possible.
How to apply? Applicants interested in the position should submit their application at https://careers.software.imdea.org/ using reference code 2020-09-postdoc-cryptoprimitives. Deadline for applications is October 23rd, 2020. Review of applications will begin immediately.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: For enquiries about the position, please contact: dario.fiore (at) imdea.org and/or ignacio.cascudo (at) imdea.org
More information: https://software.imdea.org/open_positions/2020-09-postdoc-cryptoprimitives.html
Koç University, İstanbul, Turkey
Your duties include performing research on cryptography, security, and privacy in line with our research group's focus, and direct graduate and undergraduate students in their research and teaching. The project funding is related to cryptography, game theory and mechanism design, and blockchain technologies.
Applicants are expected to have already obtained their Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science or related discipline with a thesis topic related to the duties above.
For more information about joining our group and projects, visit
https://crypto.ku.edu.tr/work-with-us/
Submit your application via email including
- full CV,
- sample publications,
- a detailed research proposal,
- and 2-3 reference letters sent directly by the referees.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Assoc. Prof. Alptekin Küpçü
https://mysite.ku.edu.tr/akupcu/
More information: https://crypto.ku.edu.tr/work-with-us/
Tampere University
The Network and Information Security Group is currently looking for several motivated and talented PostDoctoral researchers to contribute to research projects related to applied cryptography, hardware security, security and privacy. The successful candidates will primarily be working on the following topics (but not limited to):
- Differential Privacy;
- Functional Encryption;
- Privacy-Preserving Analytics;
- Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning;
- Searchable Encryption and data structures enabling efficient search operations on encrypted data;
- Processing of encrypted data in outsourced and untrusted environments;
- IoT Security and Applications to Smart Cities.
Programming skills is a must.
The positions are principa research-focused. Activities include:
- Conducting both theoretical and applied research;
- Design of secure and/or privacy-preserving protocols;
- Software development and validation;
- Reading and writing scientific articles;
- Presentation of the research results at seminars and conferences in Finland and abroad;
- Acquiring (or assisting in acquiring) further funding.
Successful candidates will be working in EU and industrial research projects. Topics will be spanning from the theoretical foundations of cryptography to the design and implementation of provable secure communication protocols with direct applications to smart cities, cloud computing and eHealth.
To apply please send the following:
- Your latest CV;
- A research statement (max 2 pages long);
- The three best papers you have co-authored.
Closing date for applications:
Contact:
- Antonis Michalas (Provable Security and Privacy): antonios.michalas@tuni.fi
01 September 2020
Daniel Shumow
João Diogo Duarte
Jonas Nick, Tim Ruffing, Yannick Seurin, Pieter Wuille
In this paper, we propose a variant of MuSig in which signers generate their nonce deterministically as a pseudorandom function of the message and all signers' public keys and prove that they did so by providing a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof to their cosigners. The resulting scheme, which we call MuSig-DN, is the first Schnorr multi-signature scheme with deterministic signing. Therefore its signing protocol is robust against failures in the randomness generation as well as attacks trying to exploit the statefulness of the signing procedure, e.g., virtual machine rewinding attacks. As an additional benefit, a signing session in MuSig-DN requires only two rounds instead of three as required by all previous Schnorr multi-signatures including MuSig. To instantiate our construction, we identify a suitable algebraic pseudorandom function and provide an efficient implementation of this function as an arithmetic circuit. This makes it possible to realize MuSig-DN efficiently using zero-knowledge proof frameworks for arithmetic circuits which support inputs given in Pedersen commitments, e.g., Bulletproofs. We demonstrate the practicality of our technique by implementing it for the secp256k1 elliptic curve used in Bitcoin.
Wei-Zhu Yeoh, Je Sen Teh, Jiageng Chen
Santi J. Vives
Ben Smyth
Anders Dalskov, Eysa Lee, Eduardo Soria-Vazquez
Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Omer Shlomovits
Although the TSS concept is not new, this is the first time that so many TSS implementations are written and deployed in such a critical context, where all liquidity reserves could be lost in a minute if the crypto fails. Furthermore, TSS schemes are sometimes extended or tweaked to best adapt to their target use case---what could go wrong?
This paper, based on the authors' experience with building and analyzing TSS technology, describes three different attacks on TSS implementations used by leading organizations. Unlike security analyses of on-paper protocols, this work targets TSS as deployed in real applications, and exploits logical vulnerabilities enabled by the extra layers of complexity added by TSS software. The attacks have concrete applications, and could for example have been exploited to empty an organization's cold wallet (typically worth at least an 8-digit dollar figure). Indeed, one of our targets is the cold wallet system of the biggest cryptocurrency exchange (which has been fixed after our disclosure).