IACR News
Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:
29 October 2020
Nanyang Technological University (Singapore)
Job PostingClosing date for applications:
Contact: Thomas Peyrin: thomas.peyrin@ntu.edu.sg
Imperial College London
Job PostingOur Computational Privacy Group at Imperial College London is offering fully funded PhD positions for 2021 to study privacy, data protection, and the impact of algorithms on society.
Topics of current interests include, for instance, individual privacy in large-scale behavioral datasets; re-identification attacks against privacy-preserving data systems or aggregates, privacy of machine learning models, privacy engineering solutions such as differential privacy and query-based systems, ethics and fairness in AI, and computational social science.
For full details, please consult https://cpg.doc.ic.ac.uk/openings/
Deadline: Nov 1th 2020 (first deadline)
Recommended prerequisites. MSc or MEng (4y BEng will be considered) in computer science, statistics, mathematics, physics, electrical engineering, or a related field. Experience in data science, statistics and/or machine learning is a plus.
We encourage all qualified candidates to apply, in particular women, disabled, BAME, and LGBTQIA+ candidates.
About Imperial. Imperial College London, ranked 9th globally, is one of the top universities in the world. A full-time PhD at the South Kensington Campus takes 3-4 years, is fully funded and usually starts in October or January.
Closing date for applications:
Contact:
demontjoye@imperial.ac.uk
- Using as subject: “PhD Application 2020: YOUR NAME”
- Including a link (e.g. Imperial’s Filedrop system or Dropbox) to your CV and transcripts for each degree
More information: https://cpg.doc.ic.ac.uk/openings/
Akinori Hosoyamada, Tetsu Iwata
ePrint Report27 October 2020
Award
The IACR Fellows Program recognizes outstanding IACR members for technical and professional contributions to the field of cryptology.
Information about nominating a Fellow is available here.
26 October 2020
Ward Beullens
ePrint ReportSikhar Patranabis, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay
ePrint ReportTo date, work on forward and backward private SSE has focused mainly on single keyword search. However, for any SSE scheme to be truly practical, it should at least support conjunctive keyword search. In this setting, most prior SSE constructions with sub-linear search complexity do not support dynamic databases. The only exception is the scheme of Kamara and Moataz (EUROCRYPT'17); however it only achieves forward privacy. Achieving both forward and backward privacy, which is the most desirable security notion for any dynamic SSE scheme, has remained open in the setting of conjunctive keyword search.
In this work, we develop the first forward and backward private SSE scheme for conjunctive keyword searches. Our proposed scheme, called Oblivious Dynamic Cross Tags (or ODXT in short) scales to very large arbitrarily-structured databases (including both attribute-value and free-text databases). ODXT provides a realistic trade-off between performance and security by efficiently supporting fast updates and conjunctive keyword searches over very large databases, while incurring only moderate access pattern leakages to the server that conform to existing notions of forward and backward privacy. We precisely define the leakage profile of ODXT, and present a detailed formal analysis of its security. We then demonstrate the practicality of ODXT by developing a prototype implementation and evaluating its performance on real world databases containing millions of documents.
Varun Narayanan, Manoj Prabhakaran, Vinod M. Prabhakaran
ePrint ReportYu Xue
ePrint ReportScott Aaronson, Jiahui Liu, Qipeng Liu Mark Zhandry, RuizheZhang
ePrint ReportMojtaba Bisheh Niasar, Reza Azarderakhsh, Mehran Mozaffari Kermani
ePrint ReportAchintya Desai, Shubham Raj, Kannan Srinathan
ePrint ReportEsra Yeniaras, Murat Cenk
ePrint ReportJihoon Cho, Jincheol Ha, Seongkwang Kim, Joohee Lee, Jooyoung Lee, Dukjae Moon, Hyojin Yoon
ePrint ReportTo address these problems, in particular, focusing on the client-side online computational overload and the ciphertext expansion, we propose a novel hybrid framework that supports CKKS. Since it seems to be infeasible to design a stream cipher operating on real numbers, we combine the CKKS and the FV homomorphic encryption schemes, and use a stream cipher using modular arithmetic in between. The proposed framework is thus dubbed the CKKS-FV transciphering framework. As a result, real numbers can be encrypted without significant ciphertext expansion or computational overload on the client side.
As a stream cipher to instantiate the CKKS-FV framework, we propose a new HE-friendly cipher, dubbed HERA, and analyze its security and efficiency. HERA is a stream cipher that features a simple randomized key schedule (RKS). Compared to recent HE-friendly ciphers such as FLIP and Rasta using randomized linear layers, HERA needs smaller number of random bits, leading to efficiency improvement on both the client and the server sides.
Our implementation shows that the CKKS-FV framework using HERA is $3.634$ to $398$ times faster on the client-side, compared to the environment where CKKS is only used, in terms of encryption time. Our framework also enjoys $2.4$ to $436.7$ times smaller ciphertext expansion according to the plaintext length.
Benoît Libert, Khoa Nguyen, Thomas Peters, Moti Yung
ePrint ReportVanesa Daza, Carla Ràfols, Alexandros Zacharakis
ePrint ReportAshley Fraser, Elizabeth A. Quaglia
ePrint Report23 October 2020
TCC
The registration to TCC 2020 and its virtual affiliated event is open: https://tcc.iacr.org/2020/registration.php
The affiliated event "Matches made in heaven: Cryptography and Theoretical Computer Science" will focus on the tight relationship between these areas (check out the speakers at https://tcc.iacr.org/2020/program.php, a web page with abstract and title is coming soon) and will take place before and after TCC talks.
Technische Universität Darmstadt
Job Posting
- Quantum algorithms
- Quantum engineering
- Quantum programming systems
- Quantum compilers
- Simulation of quantum computers
Application Deadline is November 22nd, 2020. For information about the process please follow the URL.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: For further information or questions please contact Prof. Dr. Felix Wolf, e-mail: wolf@cs.tu-darmstadt.de
More information: https://www.tu-darmstadt.de/universitaet/karriere_an_der_tu/stellenangebote/aktuelle_stellenangebote/stellenausschreibungen_detailansichten_1_379840.en.jsp
IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid, Spain
Job PostingThe IMDEA Software Institute offers an intern position in the area of security and privacy in blockchain, in the context of the project SLN: Scalability for the Lightning Network. The intern will work under the supervision of Pedro Moreno-Sanchez.
Who should apply?: Applicants should have finished (or be close to finish) a master degree in Computer Science. Experience in cryptography, distributed systems or blockchain is highly valued.
Working at IMDEA Software: The positions are based in Madrid, Spain where the IMDEA Software Institute is situated. Salaries are internationally competitive and include attractive conditions such as access to an excellent public healthcare system. The working language at the institute is English. Knowledge of Spanish is not required.
Dates: The position has guaranteed funding for 6 months. There exists the possibility to stay afterwards as PhD student. The preferred starting date is early 2021.
How to apply?: Applicants interested in the position should submit their application at https://careers.software.imdea.org/ using reference code 2020-10-intern-blockchain. Deadline for applications is November 30th, 2020. Review of applications will begin immediately.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: For enquiries about the positions, please contact: pedro(dot)moreno(at)imdea(dot)org
More information: http://software.imdea.org/open_positions/2020-10-intern-blockchain.html
University Jean Monnet, Laboratory Hubert Curien, SESAM team, Saint-Etienne, France
Job PostingClosing date for applications:
Contact: fischer(at)univ-st-etienne.fr
More information: https://laboratoirehubertcurien.univ-st-etienne.fr/en/teams/secure-embedded-systems-hardware-architectures/job-opportunities-2.html