IACR News
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12 April 2022
Alin Tomescu, Adithya Bhat, Benny Applebaum, Ittai Abraham, Guy Gueta, Benny Pinkas, Avishay Yanai
We formally define and prove the security of UTT using an MPC-style ideal functionality. Along the way, we define a new MPC framework that captures the security of reactive functionalities in a stand-alone setting, thus filling an important gap in the MPC literature. Our new framework is compatible with practical instantiations of cryptographic primitives and provides a trade-off between concrete efficiency and provable security that may be also useful for future work.
Charanjit S. Jutla, Barry Mishra
Yuhao Dong, Ian Goldberg, Sergey Gorbunov, Raouf Boutaba
In this work, we present Astrape, a novel PCN construction that achieves strong security and anonymity guarantees with simple, black-box cryptography, given a blockchain with flexible scripting. Existing anonymous PCN constructions often integrate with specific, often custom-designed, cryptographic constructions. But at a slight cost to asymptotic performance, Astrape can use any generic public-key signature scheme and any secure hash function, modeled as a random oracle, to achieve strong anonymity, by using a unique construction reminiscent of onion routing. This allows Astrape to achieve provable security that is "generic" over the computational hardness assumptions of the underlying primitives. Astrape's simple cryptography also lends itself to more straightforward security proofs compared to existing systems. Furthermore, we evaluate Astrape's performance, including that of a concrete implementation on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. We show that despite worse theoretical time complexity compared to state-of-the-art systems that use custom cryptography, Astrape operations on average have a very competitive performance of less than 10 milliseconds of computation and 1 KB of communication on commodity hardware. Astrape explores a new avenue to secure and anonymous PCNs that achieves similar or better performance compared to existing solutions.
Britta Hale, Chelsea Komlo
Sven Bauer, Hermann Drexler, Maximilian Gebhardt, Dominik Klein, Friederike Laus, Johannes Mittmann
Our work has been initiated by the CHES challenge WhibOx Contest 2021, which consisted of designing and breaking white-box ECDSA implementations, so called challenges. We illustrate our results and findings by means of the submitted challenges and provide a comprehensive overview which challenge could be solved in which way. Furthermore, we analyze selected challenges in more details.
Vanesa Daza, Paz Morillo, Sergi Rovira
Louis Vialar
Torgin Mackinga, Tejaswi Nadahalli, Roger Wattenhofer
Joachim Vandersmissen, Adrián Ranea, Bart Preneel
Steven D. Galbraith, Yi-Fu Lai
Tingting Guo, Peng Wang, Lei Hu, Dingfeng Ye
Paola de Perthuis, David Pointcheval
We study two interesting particular cases: - 2-party Inner-Product Functional Encryption, with $\mathbf{\alpha}= (1,\ldots,1)$. There is a unique functional decryption key, which enables the computation of $\mathbf{x}\cdot \mathbf{y}^\top$ by a third party, where $\mathbf{x}$ and $\mathbf{y}$ are provided by two independent clients; - Inner-Product Functional Encryption with a Selector, with $\mathbf{x}= \mathbf{x}_0 \| \mathbf{x}_1$ and $\mathbf{y}= \bar{b}^n \| b^n \in \{ 1^n \| 0^n, 0^n \| 1^n \}$, for some bit $b$, on the public coefficients $\mathbf{\alpha} = \mathbf{\alpha}_0 \| \mathbf{\alpha}_1$, in the functional decryption key, so that one gets $\mathbf{x}_b \cdot \mathbf{\alpha}_b^\top$, where $\mathbf{x}$ and $b$ are provided by two independent clients.
This result is based on the fundamental Product-Preserving Lemma, which is of independent interest. It exploits Dual Pairing Vector Spaces (DPVS), with security proofs under the \mathsf{SXDH} assumption. We provide two practical applications to medical diagnosis for the latter IPFE with Selector, and to money-laundering detection for the former 2-party IPFE, both with strong privacy properties, with adaptative security and the use of labels granting a Multi-Client Functional Encryption (MCFE) security for the scheme, thus enabling its use in practical situations.
Jordi Ribes-González, Oriol Farràs, Carles Hernández, Vatistas Kostalabros, Miquel Moretó
In this work, we tackle the problem of formally defining and analyzing the security properties of RPCs. We first give security definitions against access-based cache side-channel attacks that capture security against known attacks such as Prime+Probe and Evict+Probe. Then, using these definitions, we obtain results that allow to guarantee security by adequately choosing the rekeying period, the key generation algorithm and the cache randomizer, thus providing security proofs for RPCs under certain assumptions.
Hanno Becker, Vincent Hwang, Matthias J. Kannwischer, Lorenz Panny, Bo-Yin Yang
11 April 2022
University of Plymouth in Applied Cryptography
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Dr. Hai-Van Dang
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Submission deadline: 2 May 2022
Notification: 1 December 2022
University of Luxembourg
We offer a competitive salary (about 37,000 euro/year gross for Ph.D, and 64,000 euro/year gros for post-doc). The duration of the position is 3 years (+ 1 year extension) for Ph.D., and 2.5 years for post-doc.
Profile:
- For Ph.D. position: MSc degree or equivalent in Computer Science or in Mathematics.
- For post-doc position: a PhD in cryptography, with publications in competitive cryptographic conferences
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Prof. Jean-Sebastien Coron - jean-sebastien.coron at uni dot lu
More information: http://www.crypto-uni.lu/vacancies.html
New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), USA
Details: NJIT is a Rank 1 Research University, situated in New York Metropolitan area, and is about 7 miles away from the beautiful New York City. New York Metropolitan area is a key part of the US and is the hub of several major tech and research companies. The qualified candidates will have opportunities for research internships and joint projects with lead-industrial companies. The position is looking for highly motivated graduate students to explore, design, and implement algorithms for databases, secure computing, IoT, and blockchain.
Topics are as follows:
- Design and implementation of an end-to-end-secure database system using MPC or secret-sharing
- Algorithm development for side-channel attacks on MPC
Requirements: 1. Adequate knowledge of cryptographic techniques/algorithms, programming, and relational database systems 2. Knowledge of Java, SQL, and C/C++ 3. Familiarity with development tools for managing and building software projects, version control systems (Git), and testing tools (JUnit) 4. You must be an Undergraduate/Master student in computer science or a related field
Additional Information:
1. Starting date: As soon as possible 2. Please send your CV and other information (e.g., github account, sample projects, etc.) to: Shantanu Sharma (shantanu.sharma[AT]njit[DOT]edu) 3. Please write a few sentences in the email to introduce yourself and your interest in the position
Thank you and I look forward to hearing from you!
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Shantanu Sharma (shantanu.sharma[AT]njit[DOT]edu)
More information: https://web.njit.edu/~ss797/students.html
07 April 2022
Subspace Labs
Subspace Network is building a radically decentralized, next-generation blockchain which allows developers to easily run Web3 apps at Internet scale. Subspace is based on original research funded by the US National Science Foundation and plans to launch its Network later this year. Subspace Labs is an early-stage, venture-backed startup with a remote-first, globally distributed team.
We are seeking a Protocol Researcher to join our rapidly growing team of Blockchain and Cryptocurrency enthusiasts and engineers. As a Protocol Research you will be responsible for formally analyzing the security claims of the Subspace Network. Your goal is to formally prove these claims or suggest improvement to the protocol as needed to support them. This shall result in a series of formal specifications and peer-reviewed papers.
As a Protocol Researcher you will: Analyze and validate our solutions to some of the hardest problems in the blockchain space, as they relate to Nakamoto consensus, decentralized storage, decoupled execution, crypto-economic incentives, and the scaling trilemma; research and propose solutions to open problems or unsubstantiated claims; develop a series of formal specifications that codify and clarify our solutions; collaborate directly with our protocol engineering team to ensure that specifications are clearly understood and implemented correctly; iterate findings into research papers suitable for peer-reviewed publication; work directly with our university partners, academic advisors, and third party engineering security partners on formal security analyses and audits; present research finding at industry events and university conferences; distribute and discuss results in our open-source online research forum.
Position Requirements: A PhD in Computer Science, Cryptography or a related field, and a strong record of peer-reviewed publications in cryptography, distributed systems, or peer-to-peer network, as they relate to blockchain protocols.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Sky McWilliams, Director of People
More information: https://jobs.lever.co/subspacelabs/95bd61e2-8aae-4109-89df-67b7350263c8?lever-origin=applied&lever-source%5B%5D=IACR
Input Output Global - remote work opportunity
As a Principal Architect in Applied Cryptography at IOG, you must be an engineer, an architect, an applied cryptographer, and a leader - it’s a multifaceted role. You have the exciting challenge of working with bleeding-edge research and technology, always with a focus on the market's needs. You will be a leader of an exceptional team, working on everything from Post-Quantum prototypes to hand-optimization of existing primitives to completely new products. To support you on this challenge, we have software architects, product managers, project managers, formal methods specialists, and QA test engineers, with whom you must have high bandwidth communications.
Your mission
- Champion the applied cryptography team
- Captain end-to-end development and delivery of new products
- Spearhead prototyping of cryptographic products
- Translate research into rigorous engineering specifications and implementations
- Meticulously review cryptographic protocols and proposed primitives
- Contribute to industry standards and operational best practices
- Identify where the business needs to be next and get it there.
Closing date for applications:
Contact:
https://apply.workable.com/io-global/j/8D6CAEE7DD/
marios.nicolaides@iohk.io
More information: https://apply.workable.com/io-global/j/8D6CAEE7DD/