International Association
for Cryptologic Research

A post-doctoral position in the area of information-theoretic security and cryptography is available at the Information Theory Section of Simula UiB, Bergen, Norway. The position is two years, with the possibility of extension.

Simula UiB is a research center owned by Simula Research Laboratory and the University of Bergen. The goal of Simula UiB is to increase the security expertise in Norway through research and education. For further details, see our webpage http://simula-uib.com.

We have a solid background in coding, information theory, communication theory, and many related areas. Currently, our research focus includes various topics in private information retrieval (PIR), private computation (PC), coding for property testing, coding for zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (zk-SNARKs), and privacy-preserving technologies in general. We are looking for a candidate with a solid background within one/several of these research areas and algebraic coding theory.

We are also looking for interested candidates who:

have completed, or are about to complete, a PhD degree in information theory or a suitably related relevant field

have an excellent academic track record and will be looking for publications in relevant venues

have an excellent level of spoken and written English possesses good interpersonal and communication skills

are willing to work as part of an international team

Simula UiB Offers:

Excellent opportunities for performing high-quality research, as part of a highly competent and motivated team of international researchers and engineers;

An informal and inclusive international working environment

Generous support for travel and opportunities to build international networks,

Modern office facilities located at Marineholmen in the city center of Bergen

A competitive salary. Starting salary from NOK 543 500

There are numerous benefits: company cabin, BabyBonus arrangements, sponsored social events, generous equipment budgets, comprehensive travel/health insurance policy, Relocation assistance, etc.

Closing date for applications:

Contact:

Chief Research Scientist Eirik Rosnes, eirikrosnes@simula.no,

Research Scientist Hsuan-Yin Lin, lin@simula.no,

Administrative questions: bergen@simula.no

More information: https://www.simula.no/about/job/post-doctoral-position-coding-and-information-theory

We are looking for talented and motivated Post-docs to work on the ERC AdG project PROCONTRA: Smart-Contract Protocols: Theory for Applications. The project is about theoretical and applied aspects of blockchain and smart contracts. The ideal candidates should have a Ph.D. degree in cryptography (or related field) from a leading university, and a proven record of publications in top cryptography/security/TCS venues. We offer a competitive salary, a budget for conference travel and research visit, and membership in a young and vibrant team with several international contacts (for more see: www.crypto.edu.pl). A successful candidate will be given substantial academic freedom and can work on a variety of research problems related to the main theme of the project.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Stefan Dziembowski

More information: https://www.crypto.edu.pl/post-doc

The NIST Multi-Party Threshold Cryptography project has an open call (2021a), till September 13, 2021, for feedback on selected topics of criteria for multi-party threshold schemes.

Details here: https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/threshold-cryptography

Consider also joining the TC forum: https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/threshold-cryptography/email-list

The Security and Cryptography Lab of EPFL has postdoc positions to fill. We welcome the application of researchers with a recent PhD. The position is for one year, renewable.

Postdocs run their own research and are expected to interact with PhD students and to contribute to the lab projects. Our lab is active in cryptographic designs and analysis. fundamental and applied cryptography, security and privacy, and biometric systems.

EPFL is a top-ranked academic institute. It is located in beautiful Switzerland. We offer good environment and conditions.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Serge Vaudenay <job_lasec@epfl.ch>

Please submit your detailed cv, list of publications, motivation, references, and availability.

More information: https://lasec.epfl.ch

Fujitsu is hiring research engineers for our research lab based out of Sunnyvale, CA. We are looking for skilled developers with a research background who enjoy building systems and helping to write academic papers about them. This job will have a large open-source component, so someone who is comfortable working in the open-source space would be an ideal candidate. The role offers flexible office time with the potential to work from home for a large fraction of your time.

Job Responsibilities:

• Design and develop secure blockchain and blockchain-based systems, and write academic papers about them when possible.
• Assist in the creation and maintenance of blockchain open-source projects, and help with research projects based on them. Engage and participate in the open-source blockchain community.
• Help developers build your research systems into production-ready systems.
• Collaborate with researchers both within and outside of Fujitsu to work towards building cutting-edge systems.

Requirements:

• A master’s degree in computer science or a related field, or relevant experience in research and development
• Some track record of research publications. We don’t expect you to publish every year in top venues, but we do want evidence of familiarity with research.
• Experience in open-source development, or a willingness to learn.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Hart Montgomery (hmontgomery@fujitsu.com)

Fujitsu is hiring strong cryptographic researchers for our research lab based out of Sunnyvale, CA. We are looking for researchers who can successfully publish in top venues, collaborate with others in industry and academia, and evangelize cryptography and security within Fujitsu. The role offers flexible office time (including the potential to mostly work from home) and could be fully remote for exceptionally strong candidates.

Job Responsibilities:

• Conduct research in cryptography and related fields (i.e. distributed systems, security, and general theory) and publish it in top conferences. While researchers have wide latitude to work on whatever problems they deem interesting in the field, we do expect that at least some portion of research time will be spent on problems that are more relevant to Fujitsu’s business.
• Collaborate with others in both academia and industry on exciting research problems. Promote Fujitsu as a leader in the field of cryptography and computer security.
• Contribute to new Fujitsu technologies and IP, and help research engineers and developers shepherd the “practical” portion of your research into new business offerings.

Requirements:

• Ph.D. in computer science or a related field.
• A strong track record of publishing in top conferences in cryptography and related fields.
• A vision for the future direction of your research and ideas for how it can be impactful both academically and on Fujitsu’s business.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Hart Montgomery (hmontgomery@fujitsu.com)

The School of Computer Science & Information Technology (CSIT) seeks to appoint a Lecturer in Computer Science (Cybersecurity) to complement and strengthen the Schools’ research and teaching interests. Computer security has been a topic of research and teaching in the School for over thirty years. The school continues to grow with the appointment of new staff with cyber security expertise, introduction of new courses, and significant development of our cybersecurity research portfolio.
The school strategy is to expand its research and teaching in the area of Cybersecurity and candidates with such expertise are encouraged to apply. The School seeks to appoint a committed computer science academic, a dynamic and thoughtful individual who will contribute to its research-led teaching ethos and research agenda.
The School of CSIT has 32 full-time academic staff and offers degrees at bachelors, masters and doctoral level. It offers a welcoming and open working environment, with excellent administrative and technical support, and an inclusive collegiate experience. Academic staff in the school have leadership roles in major national and international research initiatives, including the SFI funded research centers CONNECT (Future Networks and Communications), CONFIRM (Smart Manufacturing), Insight (Data Analytics), LERO (Irish Software Research Centre), and the SFI research spokes BAV (Blended Autonomous Vehicles) and ENABLE (Smart Communities). In addition, school academics lead and host the SFI Centre for Research Training in Advanced Networks for Sustainable Societies and the SFI Centre for Research Training in Artificial Intelligence. The Cork area is home to a cybersecurity cluster of about 25 companies, including multinationals that are well-known for their security products and services, many of whom the School engages with for student internships, research sponsorship and collaboration.
Appointment may be made on the internationally competitive Lectureship (Above the Bar) Salary Scale: €67,073 - €86,241. The position is permanent, with tenure subject to successful completion of the probation and establishment periods.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Informal enquiries can be made, in confidence, to the Head of School, Prof. Cormac J. Sreenan, head@cs.ucc.ie
Applications must be submitted online via the University College Cork vacancy portal (https://ore.ucc.ie/) before 16-Sep-2021 12:00 (noon) Irish time.

More information: https://my.corehr.com/pls/uccrecruit/erq_jobspec_version_4.jobspec?p_id=048051

The problem of securely outsourcing the computation of a bilinear pairing has been widely investigated in the literature. Designing an efficient protocol with the desired functionality has, however, been an open challenge for a long time. Recently, Di Crescenzo et al. (CARDIS’20) proposed the first suite of protocols for securely and efficiently delegating pairings with online inputs under the presence of a malicious server. We progress along this path with the aim of LOVE (Lowering the cost of Outsourcing and Verifying Efficiently) a pairing. Our contributions are threefold. First, we propose a protocol (LOVE) that improves the efficiency of Di Crescenzo et al.’s proposal for securely delegating pairings with online, public inputs. Second, we provide the first implementation of efficient protocols in this setting. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our LOVE protocol in different application scenarios by benchmarking an implementation using BN, BLS12 and BLS24 pairing-friendly curves. Interestingly, compared to Di Crescenzo et al.’s protocol, LOVE is up to 29.7% faster for the client, up to 24.9% for the server and requires 23-24% less communication cost depending on the choice of parameters. Furthermore, we note that our LOVE protocol is especially suited for subgroup-secure groups: checking the correctness of the delegated pairing requires up to 56.2% less computations than evaluating the pairing locally (no delegation). This makes LOVE the most efficient protocol to date for securely outsourcing the computation of a pairing with online public inputs, even when the server is malicious.

In some practical enciphering frameworks, operational constraints may require that a secret key be embedded into the cryptographic algorithm. Such implementations are referred to as White-Box Cryptography (WBC). One technique consists of the algorithm's tabulation specialized for its key, followed by obfuscating the resulting tables. The obfuscation consists of the application of invertible diffusion and confusion layers at the interface between tables so that the analysis of input/output does not provide exploitable information about the concealed key material.

Several such protections have been proposed in the past and already cryptanalyzed thanks to a complete WBC scheme analysis. In this article, we study a particular pattern for local protection (which can be leveraged for robust WBC); we formalize it as DIBO (for Diffused-Input-Blocked-Output). This notion has been explored (albeit without having been nicknamed DIBO) in previous works. However, we notice that guidelines to adequately select the invertible diffusion $\phi$ and the blocked bijections $B$ were missing. Therefore, all choices for $\phi$ and $B$ were assumed as suitable. Actually, we show that most configurations can be attacked, and we even give mathematical proof for the attack. The cryptanalysis tool is the number of zeros in a Walsh-Hadamard spectrum. This ``spectral distinguisher'' improves on top of the previously known one (Sasdrich, Moradi, G{\"{u}}neysu, at FSE 2016). However, we show that such an attack does not work always (even if it works most of the time).

Therefore, on the defense side, we give a straightforward rationale for the WBC implementations to be secure against such spectral attacks: the random diffusion part $\phi$ shall be selected such that the rank of each restriction to bytes is full. In AES's case, this seldom happens if $\phi$ is selected at random as a linear bijection of $\F_2^{32}$. Thus, specific care shall be taken. Notice that the entropy of the resulting $\phi$ (suitable for WBC against spectral attacks) is still sufficient to design acceptable WBC schemes.

It is well-known that already the length of encrypted messages may reveal sensitive information about encrypted data. Fingerprinting attacks enable an adversary to determine web pages visited by a user and even the language and phrases spoken in voice-over-IP conversations.

Prior research has established the general perspective that a length-hiding padding which is long enough to improve security significantly incurs an unfeasibly large bandwidth overhead. We argue that this perspective is a consequence of the choice of the security models considered in prior works, which are based on classical indistinguishability of two messages, and that this does not reflect the attacker model of typical fingerprinting attacks well. Furthermore, these models also consider a model where the attacker is restricted to choosing messages of bounded length difference, depending on a given length-hiding padding of the encryption scheme. This restriction seems difficult to enforce in practice, because application layer protocols are typically unaware of the concrete length-hiding padding applied by an underlying encryption protocol, such as TLS. We also do not want to make application-layer messages dependent on the underlying encryption scheme, but instead want to provide length hiding encryption that satisfies the requirements of the given application.

Therefore we propose a new perspective on length hiding encryption, which aims to capture security against fingerprinting attacks more accurately. This makes it possible to concretely quantify the security provided by length-hiding padding against fingerprinting attacks, depending on the real message distribution of an application. We find that for many real-world applications (such as webservers with static content, DNS requests, Google search terms, or Wikipedia page visits) and their specific message distributions, even length-hiding padding with relatively small bandwidth overhead of only 2-5% can already significantly improve security against fingerprinting attacks. This gives rise to a new perspective on length-hiding encryption, which helps understanding how and under what conditions length-hiding encryption can be used to improve security.

The Learning with Rounding (LWR) problem is an important variant of the Learning with Errors (LWE) problem. Recently, Liu {\it{et al.}} proposed a comprehensive study of LWR problems defined over algebraic number fields in CRYPTO 2020. However, their search-to-decision reductions of LWR problems depend heavily on the existence of the so-called {\it{Normal Integral Basis}} (NIB). Meanwhile, the aesthetic deficiency is a lack of discussions of choices of secret $s$, and one may could not show the {\it{worst-case}} hardness of decision LWR problems {\it{strictly}} even for fields with NIB. In this paper, we give a more refined analysis of reductions between different LWR problems. Our contributions are summarized as follows: (1) We give a search-to-decision reduction of ring/module LWR problems defined over {\it{any}} number field $K=\QQ[x]/(\Phi(x))$ which is {\it{Galois}} over $\QQ$ with suitable parameters, {\it{regardless of the existence of NIB}}. (2) To the best of our knowledge, we give the first reduction from search ring/module LWE problems to corresponding search/decision LWR problems. Hence, combining known hardness results of LWE problems, we could reduce {\it{worst-case}} ideal/module lattices problems to search/decsion LWR problems {\it{strictly}}. (3) For the first time, we show the {\it{worst-case}} hardness of search/decision polynomial LWR problems defined over polynomial rings $\ZZ_q[x]/(\Phi(x))$ with {\it{comparable small parameters}}, which could be regarded as a theoretical support for some ring/module LWR based crypto-systems, e.g. the NIST Round $3$ candidate - Saber. As a finish, we also give some hardness results of middle product polynomial LWR problems.

We construct the first efficient MPC protocol that only requires black-box access to a non-commutative ring $R$. Previous results in the same setting were efficient only either for a constant number of corruptions or when computing branching programs and formulas. Our techniques are based on a generalization of Shamir's secret sharing to non-commutative rings, which we derive from the work on Reed Solomon codes by Quintin, Barbier and Chabot (IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2013). When the center of the ring contains a set $A = \{\alpha_0, \ldots, \alpha_n\}$ such that $\forall i \neq j, \alpha_i - \alpha_j \in R^*$, the resulting secret sharing scheme is strongly multiplicative and we can generalize existing constructions over finite fields without much trouble.

Most of our work is devoted to the case where the elements of $A$ do not commute with all of $R$, but they just commute with each other. For such rings, the secret sharing scheme cannot be linear ``on both sides" and furthermore it is not multiplicative. Nevertheless, we are still able to build MPC protocols with a concretely efficient online phase and black-box access to $R$. As an example we consider the ring $\mathcal{M}_{m\times m}(\mathbb{Z}/2^k\mathbb{Z})$, for which when $m > \log(n+1)$, we obtain protocols that require around $\lceil\log(n+1)\rceil/2$ less communication and $2\lceil\log(n+1)\rceil$ less computation than the state of the art protocol based on Circuit Amortization Friendly Encodings (Dalskov, Lee and Soria-Vazquez, ASIACRYPT 2020).

In this setting with a ``less commutative" $A$, our black-box preprocessing phase has a less practical complexity of $\poly(n)$. Due to this, we additionally provide specialized, concretely efficient preprocessing protocols for $R = \mathcal{M}_{m\times m}(\mathbb{Z}/2^k\mathbb{Z})$ that exploit the structure of the matrix ring.

Secure communication is an important aspect Internet of Things (IoT) applications in order to avoid cyber-security attacks and privacy issue. One of the key security aspects is data integrity, which can be protected by employing cryptographic hash functions. Recently, US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) had initialized a competition to standardize lightweight hash functions targeting constrained devices, which can be used in IoT applications. The communication in IoT involves various hardware platforms, from low-end microcontrollers to high-end cloud servers with accelerators like GPU. In this paper, we show that with carefully crafted implementation techniques, all the finalist hash function candidates in NIST standardization can achieve high throughput on GPU. This research output can be used in IoT gateway devices and cloud servers to perform data integrity check in high speed. On top of that, we also present the first implementation of these hash functions on a quantum computer (IBM ProjectQ). The efficient implementation of these hash functions on GPU and quantum computer is useful in evaluating their strength against brute-force attack, which is important to protect the secure communication in IoT.

We demonstrate the soundness proof for the De Feo, Jao and Plût identification scheme (the basis for SIDH signatures) contains an invalid assumption and provide a counterexample for this assumption - thus showing the proof of soundness is invalid. As this proof was repeated in a number of works by various authors, multiple pieces of literature are affected by this result. Due to the importance of being able to prove knowledge of an SIDH key (for example, to prevent adaptive attacks), soundness is a vital property. We propose a modified identification scheme fixing the issue with the De Feo, Jao and Plût scheme, and provide a proof of security of this new scheme. We also prove that a modification of this scheme allows the torsion points in the public key to be verified too, which previous schemes did not cover. This results in a secure proof of knowledge for SIDH keys and a secure SIDH-based signature scheme. In particular, these schemes provide a non-interactive way of verifying that SIDH public keys are well formed as protection against adaptive attacks, more efficient than generic NIZKs.

This paper initiates research on zero-knowledge middleboxes (ZKMBs). A ZKMB is a network middlebox that enforces network usage policies on encrypted traffic. Clients send the middlebox zero-knowledge proofs that their traffic is policy-compliant; these proofs reveal nothing about the client’s communication except that it complies with the policy. We show how to make ZKMBs work with unmodified encrypted-communication protocols (specifically TLS 1.3), making ZKMBs invisible to servers. As a contribution of independent interest, we design zero-knowledge proofs for TLS 1.3 session keys. We apply the ZKMB paradigm to several case studies, including filtering for encrypted DNS protocols. Experimental results suggest that performance, while not yet practical, is promising. The middlebox’s overhead is only 2–5ms of running time per verified proof. Clients must store hundreds of MBs to participate in the protocol, and added latency ranges from tens of seconds (to set up a connection) to several seconds (for each successive packet requiring proof). Our optimized TLS 1.3 proofs improve the client’s costs 6× over an unoptimized baseline.

Power-based side channel attacks have been successfully conducted against proven cryptographic algorithms including standardized algorithms such as AES and RSA. These algorithms are now supported by best practices in hardware and software to defend against malicious attacks. As NIST conducts the third round of the post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standardization process, a key feature is to identify the security candidate algorithms have against side channel attacks, and the tradeoffs that must be made to obtain that level of protection. In this work, we document the development of a multi-target and multi-tool platform to conduct test vector leakage assessment of the candidate algorithms. The long-term goals of the platform are to 1) quantify test vector leakage of each of the primary and alternate candidates, 2) quantify test vector leakage of each of the candidates when adjustments and adaptations (e.g., masking) are applied, and 3) assess the equivalent security levels when tools of varying sophistication are used in the attack (e.g., commodity vs. specialized hardware). The goal of this work is to document the progress towards that standardized platform and to invite discussion in how to extend, refine, and distribute our tools.

This paper defines a new practical construction for a code-based signature scheme. We introduce a new protocol that is designed to follow the recent ``Sigma protocol with helper'' paradigm, and prove that the protocol's security reduces directly to the Syndrome Decoding Problem. The protocol is then converted to a full-fledged signature scheme via a sequence of generic steps that include: removing the role of the helper; incorporating a variety of protocol optimizations (using e.g., Merkle trees); applying the Fiat-Shamir transformation. The resulting signature scheme is EUF-CMA secure in the QROM, with the following advantages: a) Security relies on only minimal assumptions and is backed by a long-studied NP-complete problem; b) the trusted setup structure allows for obtaining an arbitrarily small soundness error. This minimizes the required number of repetitions, thus alleviating a major bottleneck associated with Fiat-Shamir schemes. We outline an initial performance estimation to confirm that our scheme greatly outpaces existing similar type solutions.

KEMTLS is a novel alternative to the Transport Layer Security (TLS) handshake that integrates post-quantum algorithms. It uses key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) for both confidentiality and authentication, achieving post-quantum security while obviating the need for expensive post-quantum signatures. The original KEMTLS paper presents a security analysis, Rust implementation, and benchmarks over emulated networks. In this work, we provide full Go implementations of KEMTLS and other post-quantum handshake alternatives, describe their integration into a distributed system, and provide performance evaluations over real network conditions. We compare the standard (nonquantum-resistant) TLS 1.3 handshake with three alternatives: one that uses post-quantum signatures in combination with post-quantum KEMs (PQTLS), one that uses KEMTLS, and one that is a reduced round trip version of KEMTLS (KEMTLS-PDK). In addition to the performance evaluations, we discuss how the design of these protocols impacts TLS from an implementation and configuration perspective.

We show that indistinguishability obfuscation (IO) for all circuits can be constructed solely from secret-key functional encryption (SKFE). In the construction, SKFE needs to be secure against an unbounded number of functional key queries, that is, collusion-resistant. Our strategy is to replace public-key functional encryption (PKFE) in the construction of IO proposed by Bitansky and Vaikuntanathan (FOCS 2015) with puncturable SKFE. Bitansky and Vaikuntanathan introduced the notion of puncturable SKFE and observed that the strategy works. However, it has not been clear whether we can construct puncturable SKFE without assuming PKFE. In particular, it has not been known whether puncturable SKFE is constructed from standard SKFE. In this work, we show that a relaxed variant of puncturable SKFE can be constructed from collusion-resistant SKFE. Moreover, we show that the relaxed variant of puncturable SKFE is sufficient for constructing IO.

In addition, we also study the relation of collusion-resistance and succinctness for SKFE. Functional encryption is said to be weakly succinct if the size of its encryption circuit is sub-linear in the size of functions. We show that collusion-resistant SKFE can be constructed from weakly succinct SKFE supporting only one functional key.

By combining the above two results, we show that IO for all circuits can be constructed from weakly succinct SKFE supporting only one functional key.

At CRYPTO'19, Gohr built a bridge between deep learning and cryptanalysis. Based on deep neural networks, he trained neural distinguishers of Speck32/64 using a plaintext difference and single ciphertext pair. Compared with purely differential distinguishers, neural distinguishers successfully use features of the ciphertext pairs. Besides, with the help of neural distinguishers, he attacked 11-round Speck32/64 using Bayesian optimization. At EUROCRYPTO'21, Benamira proposed a detailed analysis about the inherent workings of Gohr's distinguishers. Although their work opened a new direction of machine learning aided cryptanalysis, there are still two research gaps that researchers are eager to fill in. (1) How to further improve neural distinguishers? (2) Can we conduct effective key recovery on large-size block ciphers adopting neural distinguishers?

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm and model to improve neural distinguishers in terms of accuracy and the number of rounds and present effective neural aided attack on large-size block ciphers. First, we design an algorithm based on SAT to improve neural distinguishers. With the help of SAT/SMT solver, we obtain new effective neural distinguishers of SIMON using the input differences of high-probability differential characteristics. Second, we propose a new neural distinguisher model using multiple output differences. Inspired by Benamira's work and data augmentation in deep learning, we use the output differences to exploit more derived features and train neural distinguishers, by splicing output differences into a matrix as a sample. Based on the new model, we construct neural distinguishers of SIMON and Speck with round and accuracy promotion. Utilizing our neural distinguishers, we can distinguish reduced-round NSA block ciphers from pseudo-random permutation better. Moreover, we perform practical key recovery attacks on different versions of SIMON. For SIMON32/64 and SIMON48/96, we append additional 2-round optimal characteristics searched by SAT/SMT solver to the beginning of our neural distinguishers and attack 13-round SIMON32/64, 14-round SIMON48/96 using Gohr's key recovery frame. For SIMON64/128, it costs too much time in precomputation, especially in wrong key response profile, which is unbearable for most of researchers. However, we show with experiments that the distribution of the wrong key profile is pseudo-periodic. Based on this, we make use of partial wrong key profile to describe the whole wrong key response profile, and then propose a generic key recovery attack scheme which can attack large-size block ciphers. As an application, we perform a key recovery attack on 13-round SIMON64/128 using a 11-round neural distinguisher. All our results are confirmed with experiments (source code available online).