IACR News
Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:
18 April 2022
University of Neuchatel, Switzerland
We are looking for a PhD student to join our group on reinforcement learning and decision making under uncertainty more generally, at the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland. We are looking for candidates with a strong research interest in the following fields:
- Theory of differntial privacy.
- Algorithms for differentially private machine learning.
- Algorithms for fairness in machine learning.
- Interactions between machine learning and game theory.
- Inference of human models of fairness or privacy.
The main supervisor will be Chrsitos Dimitrakakis ( https://sites.google.com/site/christosdimitrakakis ) Past research of the group in differential privacy focused on the interaction between Bayesian inference and privacy, and on the derivation of regret bounds for privacy-constrained bandit problems. The student will also have the opportunity to visit and work with other group members at the University of Oslo, Norway and Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.
Excellent technical skills in calculus, linear algebra, probability as well as competence in at least one programming language is expected. In addition,the doctoral student must have a strong background, as evidenced by their master thesis, in one of the following areas:
- Privacy.
- Theory of computation
- Statistics.
- Game theory.
- Economics.
- Fairness.
- Starting date 1 September 2022 or soon afterwards.
- Application deadline 31 May 2022.
- The PhD is funded, for 4 years, with 25% of the time as teaching assistant.
- A statement of research interests.
- A CV with a list of references.
- Your MSc thesis (or a draft) or another research work demonstrating your academic writing.
- Degree transcripts.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Christos Dimitrakakis
More information: https://sites.google.com/site/christosdimitrakakis/positions
13 April 2022
April 6, 2022
Statement from the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) Condemning the Russian war in Ukraine
The IACR strongly condemns the unprovoked and unjust war that Russia is waging in Ukraine. We are outraged by the suffering and loss of life that this brutal aggression is inflicting on the Ukrainian People.
While this war continues, the IACR will not hold or plan to hold any conference in Russia, nor will it be affiliated with conferences in Russia.
The IACR fully endorses the following joint statement by the National Academies of G7 States which was published on 2 March 2022:
"The unprovoked attack against Ukraine, a democratic and independent country, is a blatant violation of international law and of core values of humanity. The Russian invasion is an assault on the fundamental principles of freedom, democracy and self-determination, which provide the basis for academic freedom and opportunities for scientific exchange and cooperation.
In this dark hour, our thoughts and deepest sympathy are with the people of Ukraine. We are determined to support the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. We stand in solidarity with the scientific community and the scientists in Ukraine.
We acknowledge the Russian scientists and citizens who are ashamed of this attack and speak out against the war.
We call on the Russian leadership to immediately cease all military action against Ukraine and put an end to this war."
Approved by the IACR board of directors, April 6, 2022
12 April 2022
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Successful candidates must have an expert grasp of knowledge of Cybersecurity at all levels, with an emphasis on hands-on applied cybersecurity skills, either through a demonstrated record of teaching excellence, or through industrial experience. The successful candidate will also be involved in creating course content and materials with a focus on hands-on experiential and project-based learning. Strong written, oral and interpersonal skills are required in order to communicate effectively with students in person and online. The formal education and experience prerequisites may be waived at the university's discretion if the candidate can demonstrate to the satisfaction of the university an equivalent combination of education and experience specifically preparing the candidate for success in the position.
Interested applicants should submit their CV by applying as soon as possible at: https://njit.csod.com/ux/ats/careersite/1/home/requisition/3493?c=njit
Work environment and location:
The Computer Science department, part of the Ying Wu College of Computing, is the largest at NJIT, comprising one-tenth of the student population. It is also the largest computer science department among all research universities in the New York metropolitan area. Located in Northern New Jersey, within the greater New York Metropolitan area, NJIT is part of a vibrant ecosystem of research universities and corporate research centers.
Diversity is a core value of NJIT and we are committed to make diversity, equity and inclusion, part of everything we do.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Reza Curtmola (reza.curtmola@njit.edu)
More information: https://njit.csod.com/ux/ats/careersite/1/home/requisition/3493?c=njit
Subspace Labs
Who We Are
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 planning to launch its Network later this year. Subspace Labs is an early-stage, venture-backed startup with a remote-first, globally distributed team. To learn more, visit our website and read the technical whitepaper.
We are seeking a Protocol Research Intern to join our rapidly growing team of Blockchain and Cryptocurrency enthusiasts and engineers. As a Research Intern you will be responsible for assisting in analyzing the security claims of the Subspace Network. Your goal is to work on proving these claims or suggesting improvement to the protocol as needed to support them.
Other Areas for Contribution: Research and review 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 blockchain scalability trilemma; collaborate with our Research team to transform findings into peer-review quality specificaitons, publications, and presentations; work with our university partners, academic advisors, and third party engineering security partners on formal security analyses and audits.
Key Requirements: Currently enrolled in a graduate program in computer science, cryptography, or a related field, with the ability to dedicate at least 8 weeks to the internship Completed graduate level coursework in cryptography, distributed systems, peer-to-peer networking, or crypto-economic game theory; excellent written and verbal communication skills, and the ability to collaborate across our protocol and research teams; passion and curiosity for decentralized, peer-to-peer systems and Web3 technologies.
What We Offer: Competitive compensation and flexibility to work from anywhere in the world; a unique opportunity to shape the future of the Subspace Network and play a critical role in building the worlds most scalable blockchain.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Sky McWilliams, Director of People
More information: https://jobs.lever.co/subspacelabs/3594920a-d99c-40c0-9ca3-66c7eaf639da?lever-origin=applied&lever-source%5B%5D=IACR
Nasour Bagheri, Sadegh Sadeghi, Prasanna Ravi, Shivam Bhasin, Hadi Soleimany
Benedikt Bünz, Ben Fisch
Liu zhang, Zilong Wang
Anis Bkakria
In this paper, we propose the first single-point-of-failure free multi-authority ciphertext-policy ABE that simultaneously (1) ensures robustness for both decryption key issuing and access revocation while achieving forward secrecy; (2) enables outsourced decryption to reduce the decryption overhead for data users that have limited computational resources; and (3) achieves adaptive (full) security in standard models. The provided theoretical complexity comparison shows that our construction introduces linear storage and computation overheads that occurs only once during its setup phase, which we believe to be a reasonable price to pay to achieve all previous features.
Guy Goren, Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias, Alberto Sonnino, Shir Cohen, Alexander Spiegelman
Thomas Attema, Vincent Dunning, Maarten Everts, Peter Langenkamp
In multi-party computation (MPC), covert security provides an attractive trade-off between the security of actively secure protocols and the efficiency of passively secure protocols. In this security notion, honest parties are only required to detect an active attack with some constant probability, referred to as the deterrence rate. Extending covert security with public verifiability additionally ensures that any party, even an external one not participating in the protocol, is able to identify the cheaters if an active attack has been detected.
Recently, Faust et al. (EUROCRYPT 2021) and Scholl et al. (Pre-print 2021) introduced similar covert security compilers based on computationally expensive time-lock puzzles. At the cost of requiring an honest majority, our work avoids the use of time-lock puzzles completely. Instead, we adopt a much more efficient publicly verifiable secret sharing scheme to achieve a similar functionality. This obviates the need for a trusted setup and a general-purpose actively secure MPC protocol. We show that our computation and communication costs are orders of magnitude lower while achieving the same deterrence rate.
Sk. Tanzir Mehedi, Adnan Anwar, Ziaur Rahman, Kawsar Ahmed, Rafiqul Islam
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.