International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), our Coding Theory and Cryptology (CC) group of the Discrete Mathematics (DM) cluster of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (M&CS) are looking for an (tenure-track) assistant professor in Cryptology. This vacancy is part of the Irène Curie Fellowship and is currently only open for female candidates.

The position will be part of the Coding Theory and Cryptology (CC) group, within the Discrete Mathematics (DM) cluster. The other group in DM is Discrete Algebra and Geometry. The CC group consists of one full professor (Lange), two associate professors (Schoenmakers and de Weger), and three assistant professors (Hülsing Ravagnani, and Schäge). CC provides undergraduate and graduate courses in cryptology, coding theory, algebra and number theory, as well as service teaching.

The ideal candidate has research experience complementing the existing strengths in CC and a background in mathematics but candidates from all areas of cryptology are encouraged to apply.

We look forward to your application and will screen it as soon as we have received it. Screening will continue until the position has been filled. We expect the first round of interviews in early July, so apply before June 20 to be considered in this round.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Tanja Lange

More information: https://jobs.tue.nl/nl/vacature/assistant-professor-in-cryptology-936431.html

Event date: 10 July to 14 July 2023

Event date: 1 August to 4 August 2022

In previous years there has been an increased interest in designing threshold signature schemes. Most of the recent works focus on constructing threshold versions of ECDSA or Schnorr signature schemes due to their appealing usage in blockchain technologies. Additionally, a lot of research is being done on cryptographic schemes that are resistant against quantum computer attacks. Presently, the most popular family of post-quantum algorithms is lattice-based cryptography, because its structure allows creation of cryptographic protocols that go beyond encryption and digital signature schemes.

In this work, we propose a new version of the two-party Crystals-Dilithium signature scheme. The security of our scheme is based on the hardness of Module-LWE and Module-SIS problems. In our construction, we follow a similar logic as Damgård et al. (PKC 2021) and use an additively homomorphic commitment scheme. However, compared to them, our protocol uses signature compression techniques from the original Crystals-Dilithium signature scheme which makes it closer to the version submitted to the NIST PQC

In this study, we accelerate Matsui's search algorithm to search for the best differential and linear trails of AES-like ciphers. Our acceleration points are twofold. The first exploits the structure and branch number of an AES-like round function to apply strict pruning conditions to Matsui's search algorithm. The second employs permutation characteristics in trail search to reduce the inputs that need to be analyzed. We demonstrate the optimization of the search algorithm by obtaining the best differential and linear trails of existing block ciphers: AES, LED, MIDORI-64, CRAFT, SKINNY, PRESENT, and GIFT. In particular, our search program finds the full-round best differential and linear trails of GIFT-64 (in approx. 1 s and 10 s) and GIFT-128 (in approx. 89 h and 452 h), respectively. For a more in-depth application, we leverage the acceleration to investigate the optimal DC/LC resistance that GIFT-variants, called BOGI-based ciphers, can achieve. To this end, we identify all the BOGI-based ciphers and reduce them into 41,472 representatives. Deriving 16-, 32-, 64-, and 128-bit BOGI-based ciphers from the representatives, we obtain their best trails until 15, 15, 13, and 11 rounds, respectively. The investigation shows that 12 rounds are the minimum threshold for a 64-bit BOGI-based cipher to prevent efficient trails for DC/LC, whereas GIFT-64 requires 14 rounds. Moreover, it is shown that GIFT can provide better resistance by only replacing the existing bit permutation. Specifically, the bit permutation variants of GIFT-64 and GIFT-128 require fewer rounds, one and two, respectively, to prevent efficient differential and linear trails.

The introduction of Statistical Ineffective Fault Attacks (SIFA) has led to a renewed interest in fault attacks. SIFA requires minimal knowledge of the concrete implementation and is effective even in the presence of common fault or power analysis countermeasures. However, further investigations reveal that undesired and frequent ineffective events, which we refer to as the noise phenomenon, are the bottleneck of SIFA that can considerably diminish its strength. This includes noise associated with the attack’s setup and caused by the countermeasures utilized in the implementation. This research aims to address this significant drawback. We present two novel statistical fault attack variants that are far more successful in dealing with these noisy conditions. The first variant is the Statistical Effective Fault Attack (SEFA), which exploits the non-uniform distribution of intermediate variables in circumstances when the induced faults are effective. The idea behind the second proposed method, dubbed Statistical Hybrid Fault Attacks (SHFA), is to take advantage of the biased distributions of both effective and ineffective cases simultaneously. Our experimental results in various case studies, including noise-free and noisy setups, back up our reasoning that SEFA surpasses SIFA in several instances and that SHFA outperforms both or is at least as efficient as the best of them.

Event date: to
Submission deadline: 1 September 2022
Notification: 15 January 2023

Event date: 4 July to 8 July 2022

Cryptography, Security & Privacy Research Group at Koç University has one opening at the post-doctoral researcher level. Accepted applicants may receive competitive salary, housing (accommodation) support, health insurance, computer, travel support, and lunch meal card.

Your duties include performing research on cryptography, security, and privacy in line with our research group's focus, as well as directing graduate and undergraduate students in their research and teaching. The project funding is related to cryptography, game theory and mechanism design, and blockchain technologies.

Applicants are expected to have already obtained their Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science or related discipline with a thesis topic related to the duties above.

For more information about joining our group and projects, visit

https://crypto.ku.edu.tr/work-with-us/

Submit your application via email including

• full CV,
• transcripts of all universities attended,
• 1-3 sample publications where you are the main author,
• a detailed research proposal,
• 2-3 reference letters sent directly by the referees.

Application and start dates are flexible.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Assoc. Prof. Alptekin Küpçü
https://member.acm.org/~kupcu

More information: https://crypto.ku.edu.tr/work-with-us/

Cryptography, Security & Privacy Research Group at Koç University has multiple openings at every level. Accepted Computer Science and Engineering applicants may receive competitive scholarships including monthly stipend, tuition waiver, housing (accommodation) support, health insurance, computer, travel support, and lunch meal card.

Your duties include performing research on cryptography, security, and privacy in line with our research group's focus, assist teaching, as well as collaborating with other graduate and undergraduate students. Computer Science, Mathematics, Cryptography, or related background is necessary.

For applying online, and questions about the application-process for M.Sc. and Ph.D. positions, visit

https://gsse.ku.edu.tr/en/admissions/application-requirements

All applications must be completed online. Applications with missing documents will not be considered. Applications via e-mail will not be considered. Application Requirements:

1. CV
2. Recommendation Letters (2 for MSc, 3 for PhD)
3. TOEFL (for everyone whose native language is not English, Internet Based: Minimum Score 80)
4. GRE score
5. Official transcripts from all the universities attended
6. Statement of Purpose
7. Area of Interest Form filled online

https://gsse.ku.edu.tr/en/admissions/how-to-apply/

We also have a non-thesis paid Cyber Security M.Sc. program:

https://cybersecurity.ku.edu.tr/

For more information about joining our group and projects, visit

https://crypto.ku.edu.tr/work-with-us/

Closing date for applications:

Contact: https://gsse.ku.edu.tr/en/admissions/how-to-apply/

More information: https://gsse.ku.edu.tr/en/prospective-students/how-to-apply/

Blockchains are not private enough for safe use by citizens, corporations, or dissidents. Heliax is looking for a cryptographer & researcher interested in zero-knowledge cryptographic protocols and their application to distributed ledger technology to work with us to design, evaluate, and implement zero-knowledge proof constructions such as zkSNARKs and zkSTARKs, distributed cryptographic protocols such as threshold encryption and distributed key generation, and cryptographic primitives such as elliptic curves and hash functions, then put this cryptography into practice in order to realise privacy and scalability capabilities required by the next generation of blockchain networks. This role offers the chance to work closely with a small team on compelling cross-disciplinary problems in theoretical computer science, cryptography, game theory, economics, and systems design, and enjoy a high degree of independence in working conditions and task prioritization.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Heliax HR

More information: https://heliax.dev/jobs/zero-knowledge-cryptographer-protocol-developer/

Blockchains are not private enough for safe use by citizens, corporations, or dissidents. Heliax is looking for a research cryptographer interested in fully-homomorphic encryption protocols and their application to distributed ledger technology to work with us to design, evaluate, and implement FHE constructions, then put this cryptography into practice in order to realise privacy and scalability capabilities required by the next generation of blockchain networks. This role offers the chance to work closely with a small team on compelling cross-disciplinary problems in theoretical computer science, cryptography, game theory, economics, and systems design, and enjoy a high degree of independence in working conditions and task prioritization.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Heliax HR Team

More information: https://heliax.dev/jobs/research-cryptographer-FHE/

Passive physical attacks represent a threat to microelectronics systems by exploiting leakages through side-channels, such as power consumption and electromagnetic radiation. In this context, masking is a sound countermeasure against side-channel attacks, which splits the secret data into several randomly uniform data, achieving independence between the data processing and the secret variable. However, a secure masking scheme requires additional implementation costs. Furthermore, glitches and early evaluation can temporally weaken a masked implementation in hardware, creating a potential source of exploitable leakages.

This work shows how to create register-free masking schemes that avoid the early evaluation effect with the help of the dual-rail logic. Moreover, we employ monotonic functions with the purpose of eliminating the occurrence of glitches in combinational circuits. Finally, we evaluate different 2-share masked implementations of the PRESENT and AES S-boxes in a noiseless scenario in order to detect potential first-order leakages and to determine data propagation profiles correlated to the secret variables.

Digital ledger technologies supporting smart contracts usually does not ensure any privacy for user transactions or state. Most solutions to this problem either use private network setups, centralized parties, hardware enclaves, or cryptographic primitives, which are novel, complex, and computationally expensive. This paper looks into an alternative way of implementing smart contracts. Our construction of a protocol for smart contracts employs an overlay protocol design pattern for decentralized applications, which separates transaction ordering from transaction validation. This enables consensus on application state while revealing only encrypted versions of transactions to public consensus protocol network. UTXO-based smart contract model allows partitioning state of distributed ledger in a way that participants would need to decrypt and reach consensus only on those transactions, which are relevant to them. We present security analysis, which shows that, assuming presence of a secure consensus protocol, our construction achieves consensus on UTXO-based transactions, while hiding most of transaction details from all protocol parties, except a limited subset of parties, which need particular transactions for construction of their state.

Cryptosystems have been developed over the years under the typical prevalent setting which assumes that the receiver’s key is kept secure from the adversary, and that the choice of the message to be sent is freely performed by the sender and is kept secure from the adversary as well. Under these fundamental and basic operational assumptions, modern Cryptography has flourished over the last half a century or so, with amazing achievements: New systems (including public-key Cryptography), beautiful and useful models (including security definitions such as semantic security), and new primitives (such as zero-knowledge proofs) have been developed. Furthermore, these fundamental achievements have been translated into actual working systems, and span many of the daily human activities over the Internet.

However, in recent years, there is an overgrowing pressure from many governments to allow the government itself access to keys and messages of encryption systems (under various names: escrow encryption, emergency access, communication decency acts, etc.). Numerous non-direct arguments against such policies have been raised, such as "the bad guys can utilize other encryption system" so all other cryptosystems have to be declared illegal, or that "allowing the government access is an ill-advised policy since it creates a natural weak systems security point, which may attract others (to masquerade as the government)." It has remained a fundamental open issue, though, to show directly that the above mentioned efforts by a government (called here “a dictator” for brevity) which mandate breaking of the basic operational assumption (and disallowing other cryptosystems), is, in fact, a futile exercise. This is a direct technical point which needs to be made and has not been made to date.

In this work, as a technical demonstration of the futility of the dictator’s demands, we invent the notion of “Anamorphic Encryption” which shows that even if the dictator gets the keys and the messages used in the system (before anything is sent) and no other system is allowed, there is a covert way within the context of well established public-key cryptosystems for an entity to immediately (with no latency) send piggybacked secure messages which are, in spite of the stringent dictator conditions, hidden from the dictator itself! We feel that this may be an important direct technical argument against the nature of governments’ attempts to police the use of strong cryptographic systems, and we hope to stimulate further works in this direction.

The celebrated result by Gentry and Wichs established a theoretical barrier for succinct non-interactive arguments (SNARGs), showing that for (expressive enough) hard-on-average languages we must assume non-falsifiable assumptions. We further investigate those barriers by showing new negative and positive results related to extractability and to the preprocessing model. 1. We first ask the question “are there further barriers to SNARGs that are knowledge-sound (SNARKs) and with a black-box extractor?”. We show it is impossible to have such SNARKs in the standard model. This separates SNARKs in the random oracle model (which can have black-box extraction) and those in the standard model. 2. We find positive results regarding the same question in the non-adaptive setting. Under the existence of SNARGs (without extractability) and from standard assumptions, it is possible to build SNARKs with black-box extractability for a non-trivial subset of NP. 3. On the other hand, we show that (under some mild assumptions) all NP languages cannot have SNARKs with black-box extractability even in the non-adaptive setting. 4. The Gentry-Wichs result does not account for the preprocessing model, under which fall several efficient constructions. We show that also in the preprocessing model it is impossible to construct SNARGs that rely on falsifiable assumptions in a black-box way. Along the way, we identify a class of non-trivial languages, which we dub “trapdoor languages”, that bypass some of these impossibility results.

In attribute-based proxy re-encryption (AB-PRE) and attribute-based conditional proxy re-encryption (AB-CPRE) systems, the proxy transforms a ciphertext associated with policy $f$ to a ciphertext associated with policy $g$ or transforms a ciphertext for delegator satisfying a fine-grained condition to a ciphertext for delegatee. However, such PRE schemes have found many practical applications requiring fine-grained access control while keeping flexible delegation. Unfortunately, the existing PRE schemes are impossible to handle simultaneously with the above scenarios. In this work, we introduce the notion of conditional attribute-based proxy re-encryption (CAB-PRE), which enables a proxy only to transform a ciphertext associated with policy $f$ meeting the special delegation requirements by delegator to a ciphertext associated with policy $g$. We formalize its honestly re-encryption attacks (HRA) security model that implies CPA-secure, giving a concrete CAB-PRE scheme based on learning with errors (LWE) assumption. Finally, we show that CAB-PRE implies AB-PRE and AB-CPRE notions, and propose their constructions.

Code-based cryptography received attention after the NIST started the post-quantum cryptography standardization process in 2016. A central NP-hard problem is the binary syndrome decoding problem, on which the security of many code-based cryptosystems lies. The best known methods to solve this problem all stem from the information-set decoding strategy, first introduced by Prange in 1962. A recent line of work considers augmented versions of this strategy, with hints typically provided by side-channel information. In this work, we consider the integer syndrome decoding problem, where the integer syndrome is available but might be noisy. We study how the performance of the decoder is affected by the noise. We provide experimental results on cryptographic parameters for the BIKE and Classic McEliece cryptosystems, which are finalist and alternate candidates for the third round of the NIST standardization process, respectively.

The ability to trust a system to act safely and securely strongly relies on the integrity of the software that it runs. To guarantee authenticity of the software one can include cryptographic data such as digital signatures on application images that can only be generated by trusted parties. These are typically based on cryptographic primitives such as Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) or Elliptic-Curve Cryptography (ECC), whose security will be lost whenever a large enough quantum computer is built. For that reason, migration towards Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) is necessary. This paper investigates the practical impact of migrating the secure boot flow on a Vehicle Network Processor (S32G274A) towards PQC. We create a low-memory fault-attack- resistant implementation of the Dilithium signature verification algorithm and evaluate its impact on the boot flow.

Threshold signature schemes enable distribution of the signature issuing capability to multiple users, to mitigate the threat of signing key compromise. Though a classic primitive, these signatures have witnessed a surge of interest in recent times due to relevance to modern applications like blockchains and cryptocurrencies. In this work, we study round-optimal threshold signatures in the post- quantum regime and improve the only known lattice-based construction by Boneh et al [CRYPTO’18] as follows:

• Efficiency. We reduce the amount of noise flooding used in the construction from $2^{\Omega(\lambda)}$ down to $\sqrt{Q}$, where $Q$ is the bound on the number of generated signatures and $\lambda$ is the security parameter. By using lattice hardness assumptions over polynomial rings, this allows to decrease the signature bit-lengths from $\widetilde{O}(\lambda^3)$ to~$\widetilde{O}(\lambda)$, bringing them significantly closer to practice. Our improvement relies on a careful analysis using Rényi divergence rather than statistical distance in the security proof.

• Instantiation. The construction of Boneh et al requires a standard signature scheme to be evaluated homomorphically. To instantiate this, we provide a homomorphism-friendly variant of Lyubashevsky’s signature [EUROCRYPT ’12] which achieves low circuit depth by being “rejection-free” and uses an optimal, moderate noise flooding of $\sqrt{Q}$, matching the above.

• Towards Adaptive Security. The construction of Boneh et al satisfies only selective security, where all the corrupted parties must be announced before any signing query is made. We improve this in two ways: in the Random Oracle Model, we obtain partial adaptivity where signing queries can be made before the corrupted parties are announced but the set of corrupted parties must be announced all at once. In the standard model, we obtain full adaptivity, where parties can be corrupted at any time but this construction is in a weaker pre-processing model where signers must be provided correlated randomness of length proportional to the number of signatures, in an offline preprocessing phase.