IACR News
Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:
18 October 2022
IT University of Copenhagen
- Multiparty Computation (MPC)
- Zero Knowledge
- Blockchain consensus and scalability
- (Privacy Preserving) Cryptocurrencies
The goal of this project is to develop solid theoretical foundations and efficient constructions of protocols for privacy preserving computation in decentralised settings (e.g. smart contracts) with auditability guarantees. Hence, the successful candidate should be comfortable with theoretical research but a background in applications or implementation of cryptographic protocols is also welcome. Previous experience with the specific areas above and/or a background in cryptographic protocol theory is a plus. The successful candidate should be able to work well in a team including academics and industry partners.
The position is fully funded and the student will be offered a full-time contract with the IT University of Copenhagen for the duration of the PhD program. In connection to working and living in Copenhagen, the student will have full access to high quality public health and education for themselves and their family. As part of the project, the student will also have access to travel funds for short term visits to partners, attending academic events and doing a long term stay at a relevant research group in a university abroad.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Bernardo David (beda@itu.dk)
More information: https://candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationInit.aspx?cid=119&ProjectId=181493&DepartmentId=3439&MediaId=1282
Texas A&M University
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Nitesh Saxena
17 October 2022
University of Bern, Switzerland
Multiple postdoc positions are available in the Cryptology and Data Security research group at the Institute of Computer Science, University of Bern, led by Christian Cachin.
https://crypto.unibe.ch/
Our research addresses all aspects of security in distributed systems, especially cryptographic protocols, consistency, consensus, and cloud-computing security. We are particularly interested in blockchains, decentralized protocols, distributed cryptosystems, and the technical aspects of cryptocurrencies.
Candidates should have a strong background in computer science. They should like conceptual, rigorous thinking for working theoretically, or be interested in building innovative systems for working practically. Demonstrated expertise in cryptography, distributed computing, or blockchain technology is a plus. Applicants must hold a Ph.D., with contributions in the relevant research topics.
Positions are available for starting in early 2023 and come with a competitive salary. The selection process runs until suitable candidates have been found. The University of Bern conducts excellent research and lives up its vision that “Knowledge generates value”. The city of Bern lies in the center of Switzerland and offers some of the highest quality of life worldwide.
If you are interested, please apply be sending email with one single PDF file and subject line set to Application for Postdoc addressed directly to Prof. Christian Cachin at crypto (at) inf.unibe.ch.
For more information, please contact Christian Cachin (https://crypto.unibe.ch/cc/).
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Christian Cachin (email: crypto the-at-sign inf.unibe.ch)
More information: https://crypto.unibe.ch/jobs/
Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
As a PhD candidate in this area, you will work on algebraic cryptanalysis of post-quantum cryptosystems. The research focus will be on improving existing and developing new methods for analysis of structured algebraic systems obtained by appropriate modeling of post-quantum cryptosystems. While multivariate cryptosystems are a natural choice for the approach, you will also work on extending the developed methodology to other types of post-quantum cryptosystems. You will be expected to generate relevant research in this direction that can be further developed and applied in related problem areas.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Simona Samardjiska, Digital Security Group, Radboud University
More information: https://www.ru.nl/en/working-at/job-opportunities/phd-candidate-in-post-quantum-cryptography
15 October 2022
Kaveh Aasaraai, Don Beaver, Emanuele Cesena, Rahul Maganti, Nicolas Stalder, Javier Varela
We focus on accelerating large MSM on FPGA, and we present speed records for $\texttt{BLS12-377}$ on FPGA: 5.66s for $N=2^{26}$, sub-second for $N=2^{22}$.
We developed a fully-pipelined curve adder in extended Twisted Edwards coordinates that runs at 250MHz. Our architecture incorporates a scheduler to reorder curve operations, that's suitable not just for hardware acceleration, but also for software implementations using affine coordinates with batch inversion. The software implementation achieves +$10-20$\% performance improvement over the state-of-the-art $\texttt{gnark-crypto}$ library.
Rex Fernando, Elaine Shi, Pratik Soni, Nikhil Vanjani
In this work, we show how to construct a non-interactive anonymous router scheme with sub-quadratic router computation, assuming the existence of subexponential indistinguishability obfuscation and one-way permutation. To achieve this, we devise new techniques for reasoning about a network of obfuscated programs.
CEA-LIST , Paris-Saclay, France
We are seeking an internship candidate for their end of Master's internship at CEA-LIST crypto team on the aforementioned topic. Successful candidate will be joining a vibrant team working on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), with a strong collaboration with several academic and industrial partners around the globe.
FHE is a cryptographic technique that allow computations to be performed on encrypted data. The FHE represents an interesting solution to certain problems posed by multipartite computation (MPC). The internship will be focussed on developing a design and implementation of multipartite Brakerski-Gentry-Vaikuntanathan (BGV) scheme. For more details: please send an email.
Candidate profile :
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Olive Chakraborty (olive.chakraborty@cea.fr), Renaud Sirdey, Aymen Boudguiga
14 October 2022
Aarhus University, Denmark
The position is available from February 2023 or later.
Research area and project description:
This project is supported by the Danish DIREC research center. It is a collaboration between Aarhus University and the IT-university Copenhagen, the Alexandra Institute, Concordium ApS and the election commission of Greenland.
direc.dk/privacy-preserving-and-software-independent-voting-protocols/
The aim of the project is work towards secure implementations of Blockchain Voting Governance Protocols and Internet Voting Protocols.
Voting and blockchains are intimately connected. Voting is used in blockchains for consensus, governance, and decentralized organizations. Conversely, elections are based on trust, which means that election systems ideally should be based on algorithms and data structures that are already trusted. Blockchains provide such a technology. They provide a trusted bulletin board, which can be used as part of some voting protocols. Moreover, voting crucially depends on establishing the identity of the voter to avoid fraud and to establish eligibility verifiability.
Decades of research in voting protocols have shown how difficult it is to combine the privacy of the vote with the auditability of the election outcome. It is easy to achieve one without the other, but hard to combine both into one protocol. Thus, the topic of this proposed research proposal is to investigate voting protocols and their relation to blockchains.
The team in Aarhus will work on (machine-checked) security proofs of these protocols and their implementations, for instance using tools such as ConCert and SSProve which are build on the Coq proof assistant.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Bas Spitters (spitters@cs.au.dk)
More information: https://phd.nat.au.dk/for-applicants/open-calls/november-2022/privacy-preserving-and-software-independent-voting-protocols
University of Georgia - School of Computing, Institute for Cybersecurity and Privacy
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Roberto Perdisci - Director, Institute for Cybersecurity and Privacy - School of Computing, University of Georgia
More information: https://www.ugajobsearch.com/postings/279983
Simula UiB, Bergen, Norway
The initial focus of the lab will depend on the selected candidate's skills and experience, but areas of interest include (but are not limited to): side-channel analysis and security, secure and optimised hardware (e.g. FPGA) implementations and designs, edge computing platforms design. The position comes with a large degree of autonomy, and the research fellow will be in charge of the research lab's daily operations. They will have the opportunity to work with PhD students and collaborate with other researchers at Simula UiB.
The main goals of the new research lab at Simula UiB are: to expand the centre’s activities into more applied and hands-on research; connect theoretical and applied research conducted at Simula UiB; and create opportunities for collaborations with industry and similar labs elsewhere. We expect that the research lab will build demonstrators and run demos to showcase the lab’s research to visitors from industry, government and other stakeholders. This is an exciting opportunity for an ambitious and independent researcher with the right skills and experience to develop their research career. Simula UiB can offer a vibrant, stimulating and inclusive work environment to the right candidate to build a research lab from the ground up with full support from management. The position is initially for two years, with a potential extension for further two years, subject to satisfactory evaluation of the lab activities and progress.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Øyvind Ytrehus, Research Director
More information: https://www.simula.no/about/job/postdoctoral-fellow-simula-uib
University of St.Gallen, Switzerland
Key Responsibilities:
- The post-doctoral fellow is expected to perform exciting and challenging research in the area of information security and cryptography including the design of provably secure cryptographic protocols.
- The post-doctoral fellow shall be involved in the supervision of PhD and master students
- The post-doctoral researcher is expected to have a PhD degree in Computer Science, Engineering or Mathematics and a strong background in theoretical computer science and cryptography
- Have an excellent publication record in top venues Competitive research record in cryptography or information security
- Strong mathematical and algorithmic CS background
- Good skills in programming is beneficial
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English
Please apply by 15. Oktober 2022.
Closing date for applications:
Contact:
Eriane Breu, eriane.breu@unisg.ch (Administrative matters)
Prof. Katerina Mitrokotsa, katerina.mitrokotsa@unisg.ch (Research related questions)
More information: https://jobs.unisg.ch/offene-stellen/postdoc-fellow-in-cryptography-information-security-m-w-d/c35410fb-40bb-41f2-b298-8be150d8f9b6
Florian Stolz, Jan Philipp Thoma, Pascal Sasdrich, Tim Güneysu
Dario Fiore, Ida Tucker
In this paper, we identify and formalize a key primitive allowing one to achieve the above: homomorphic signatures which evaluate non-deterministic computations (HSNP). We provide a generic construction for an HSNP evaluating universal relations; instantiate the construction; and implement a library for HSNP. This in turn allows us to build SPHINX: a system for proving arbitrary computations over streamed authenticated data in a privacy-preserving manner. SPHINX improves significantly over alternative solutions for this model. For instance, compared to corresponding solutions based on Marlin (Eurocrypt'20), the proof generation of SPHINX is between $15\times$ and $1\,300\times$ faster for various computations used in sliding-window statistics.
Anju Alexander, Annapurna Valiveti, Srinivas Vivek
In this work, we propose a third-order TBM scheme for arbitrary S-boxes that is secure in the probing model and under compositions, i.e., 3-SNI secure. It is very efficient in terms of the overall running time, compared to the third-order instantiations of state-of-the-art HO-TBM schemes. It also supports the pre-processing functionality. For example, the overall running time of a single execution of the third-order masked AES-128 on a 32-bit ARM-Cortex M4 micro-controller is reduced by about 80% without any overhead on the online execution time. This implies that the online execution time of the proposed scheme is approximately eight times faster than the bit-sliced masked implementation at third order, and it is comparable to the recent scheme of Wang et al. (TCHES 2022) that makes use of reuse of shares. We also present the implementation results for the third-order masked PRESENT cipher. Our work suggests that there is a significant scope for tuning the performance of HO-TBM schemes at lower orders.
Reo Eriguchi, Atsunori Ichikawa, Noboru Kunihiro, Koji Nuida
Reo Eriguchi, Noboru Kunihiro, Koji Nuida
Practical Asynchronous High-threshold Distributed Key Generation and Distributed Polynomial Sampling
Sourav Das, Zhuolun Xiang, Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias, Ling Ren
William Diehl
Seongkwang Kim, Jincheol Ha, Mincheol Son, Byeonghak Lee, Dukjae Moon, Joohee Lee, Sangyup Lee, Jihoon Kwon, Jihoon Cho, Hyojin Yoon, Jooyoung Lee
In this paper, we refine algebraic cryptanalysis of power mapping based S-boxes over binary extension fields, and cryptographic primitives based on such S-boxes. In particular, for the Gröbner basis attack over $\mathbb{F}_2$, we experimentally show that the exact number of Boolean quadratic equations obtained from the underlying S-boxes is critical to correctly estimate the theoretic complexity based on the degree of regularity. Similarly, it turns out that the XL attack might be faster when all possible quadratic equations are found and used from the S-boxes. This refined cryptanalysis leads to more precise estimation on the algebraic immunity of cryptographic primitives based on algebraic S-boxes.
Considering the refined algebraic cryptanalysis, we propose a new one-way function, dubbed $\mathsf{AIM}$, as an MPCitH-friendly symmetric primitive with high resistance to algebraic attacks. The security of $\mathsf{AIM}$ is comprehensively analyzed with respect to algebraic, statistical, quantum, and generic attacks. $\mathsf{AIM}$ is combined with the BN++ proof system, yielding a new signature scheme, dubbed $\mathsf{AIMer}$. Our implementation shows that $\mathsf{AIMer}$ significantly outperforms existing signature schemes based on symmetric primitives in terms of signature size and signing time.