IACR News
Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:
26 January 2022
Advanced Blockchain
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Nanni Sackmann
More information: https://incredulous.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=62
Blockstream Research (Remote)
Blockstream was founded in 2014 by Dr. Adam Back and a group of fellow cryptographers and engineers passionate about Bitcoin and its potential to change the future of finance. Focusing on building fundamental Bitcoin infrastructure, Blockstream quickly grew into one of the leading technology power houses of the industry.
Through our sidechain technology (the Liquid Network), wallets (Blockstream Green, Blockstream Jade, AQUA), mining colocation (Blockstream Mining), satellite network (Blockstream Satellite), and protocol contributions (Bitcoin research, c-lightning), we are proud to be making global peer-to-peer finance a reality.
The research team supports Blockstream’s efforts and the wider Bitcoin ecosystem. The main focus is on signature schemes and scripting languages for the Bitcoin protocol, sidechains and the Lightning Network. Furthermore, Blockstream Research drives key open source projects in the Bitcoin space.
What You’ll Be Doing (Responsibilities):
- Contribute to open source cryptography libraries such as {rust-,}secp256k1{,-zkp} (implement new schemes, review, QA)
- Help with designing, developing and breaking new cryptographic schemes
- Devise and critically evaluate specifications of cryptographic systems, e.g., in the multi-, threshold- and aggregate-signature space.
What We Look For In You (Required Qualifications):
- Experience implementing cryptography Care about secure and misuse-resistant designs
Nice To Haves (Preferred Qualifications):
- Knowledge of Rust or C or willingness to learn C89
- Previous academic work on digital signatures, discrete logarithm based cryptography, post-quantum cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, or other areas of cryptography
- Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science or a related field
- Familiarity with Bitcoin and Layer 2’s at a protocol level
- Familiarity with contributing to open source projects
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Andrew Poelstra, apoelstra@blockstream.com
More information: https://boards.greenhouse.io/blockstream/jobs/3846046
25 January 2022
Francesca Falzon, Evangelia Anna Markatou, Zachary Espiritu, Roberto Tamassia
Kamil Kluczniak
Unfortunately, current fully homomorphic schemes based on NTRU became extremely impractical duo to efficient sublattice attacks. Roughly speaking, these types of (leveled) homomorphic encryption schemes, to support a reasonable depth of the circuit we want to evaluate, require publishing RLWE or NTRU encryptions with a very large modulus. Unfortunately, recovering the sublattice and breaking the NTRU problem for such large moduli turns out to be easy, and to compensate, one would need to choose an impractically large dimension. We call NTRU instances with a too large modulus ``overstretched''. Due to the sublattice attacks, any serious work on practical NTRU-based fully homomorphic encryption essentially stopped.
In this paper, we reactivate research on practical FHE that can be based on NTRU. To do so, we design an efficient bootstrapping scheme in which the noise growth is small enough to keep the modulus to dimension ratio relatively small, thus avoiding the negative consequences of ``overstretching'' the modulus. Our bootstrapping algorithm is an accumulation-type bootstrapping scheme analogous to FHEW/TFHE. Finally, we show that we can use the bootstrapping procedure to compute any function over $\mathbb{Z}_p$. Consequently, we obtain one of the fastest FHE schemes to compute arithmetic circuits over finite fields.
Ștefania Andrieș, Andrei-Daniel Miron, Andrei Cristian, Emil Simion
The DFINITY Team
Luke Pearson, Joshua Fitzgerald, Héctor Masip, Marta Bellés-Muñoz, Jose Luis Muñoz-Tapia
Axin Wu, Jian Weng, Weiqi Luo, Anjia Yang, Jia-Nan Liu, Zike Jiang
24 January 2022
Status.im
You must have:
Bonus points if you have:
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Email: angel@status.im Discord: LilChiChi#0021
More information: https://jobs.status.im/?gh_jid=3704158
Monash University, Faculty of IT, Melbourne, Australia
You should have a PhD (or nearly finish PhD) and demonstrate expertise in one or more of the following research areas: cryptography (including zero-knowledge proofs, secure multi-party computation and other advanced primitives), interdisciplinary cybersecurity, human aspects of cybersecurity, secure critical infrastructures, blockchain technology, security of AI and machine learning, and security requirements engineering.
Interested party can apply through this link: https://careers.pageuppeople.com/513/cw/en/job/629426/lecturersenior-lecturer-identified-position-women
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Joseph Liu ( joseph . liu @ monash . edu )
More information: https://careers.pageuppeople.com/513/cw/en/job/629426/lecturersenior-lecturer-identified-position-women
National Sun Yat-sen University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering; Kaohsiung, Taiwan
Applications are invited for the M.S. and Ph.D. positions in Information Security at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Successful candidates will work at CANSEC Lab on various topics in Applied Cryptology under the supervision of Arijit Karati. Expertise in post-quantum cryptography, secure vehicle communication, edge computing, satellite communication, and 6G security may be beneficial. We are seeking students dedicated to their research and are highly motivated. There are currently 05 openings (03 for M.S. and 02 are Ph.D.).
Responsibilities:
Aside from academic work, students must participate in various activities, either in a group or individually, including (but not limited to):
Requirements:
Students must meet the following major requirements in addition to the university's fundamental admission policies (https://cse.nsysu.edu.tw/?Lang=en):
Scholarship:
Method to join CANSEC:
Candidates must apply properly through the ONLINE portal after satisfying the prerequisites.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Arijit Karati (arijit.karati@mail.cse.nsysu.edu.tw)
23 January 2022
Lucjan Hanzlik, Julian Loss, Benedikt Wagner
In contrast, due to limited memory, most existing FIDO2 tokens use one of the following approaches to handle an unlimited number of keys. Key derivation derives a fresh per-server secret key from a common seed. Key wrapping stores an encryption of the key on the server and retrieves them for each authentication. These approaches substantially complicate the protocols and their security analysis. In particular, they bear additional risks for privacy and security of FIDO2 that are not captured in the model Barbosa et al. model.
In this paper, we revisit the security of the FIDO2 as implemented in practice. Our contributions are as follows. (1) We adapt the model of Barbosa et al. so as to capture authentication tokens using key derivation or key wrapping. (2) In our adapted model, we provide the first formal definition of privacy for FIDO2 and show that these common FIDO2 token implementations are secure in our model, if the underlying building blocks are chosen appropriately. (3) Finally, we address the unsolved problem of global key revocation in FIDO2. We first provide appropriate syntax of a revocation procedure and extend our model to support this feature. We then provide the first secure global key revocation protocol for FIDO2. Our solution is based on the popular BIP32 standard used in cryptocurrency wallets.
Mathieu Baudet, Alberto Sonnino, Mahimna Kelkar, George Danezis
Carsten Baum, Robin Jadoul, Emmanuela Orsini, Peter Scholl, Nigel P. Smart
In this work, we bridge this gap between designated-verifier proofs and public verifiability by {\em distributing the verifier}. Here, a set of verifiers can then verify a proof and, if a given threshold $t$ of the $n$ verifiers is honest and trusted, can act as guarantors for the validity of a statement. We achieve this while keeping the concrete efficiency of current designated-verifier proofs, and present constructions that have small concrete computation and communication cost. We present practical protocols in the setting of threshold verifiers with $t
Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, Alexandra Henzinger, Dmitry Kogan
Yu Long Chen, Stefano Tessaro
We present a tweakable one-call construction which matches the security of the most secure two-call construction -- the resulting security bound takes form O((p+q)q/2^n), where q is the number of construction evaluations and p is the number of direct adversarial queries to the underlying n-bit permutation, which is modeled as random. Moreover, we present a new two-call construction with much better security degradation -- in particular, for applications of interest, where only a constant number of evaluations per tweak are made, the security degrades as O((sqrt(q)p+q^2)/2^n).
Our security proof relies on on the sum-capture theorems (Babai ’02; Steinberger ’12, Cogliati and Seurin ’18), as well as on new balls-into-bins combinatorial lemmas for limited independence ball-throws.
Of independent interest, we also provide a self-contained concrete security treatment of oblivious transfer extension.
IRVINE, United States, 26 May 2022
Submission deadline: 27 January 2022
Notification: 27 February 2022
Cyprus, Cyprus, 7 September - 9 September 2022
Submission deadline: 23 May 2022
Notification: 11 July 2022
Barcelona, Spain, 10 July - 16 July 2022
Submission deadline: 1 March 2022
Notification: 15 April 2022
Barcelona, Spain, 10 July - 16 July 2022
Submission deadline: 1 March 2022
Notification: 15 April 2022