IACR News
Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:
23 October 2022
Gheorghe Pojoga, Kostas Papagiannopoulos
ePrint Report
Murat Burhan İlter, Ali Aydin Selcuk
ePrint Report
In this paper, we conducted a MILP-based analysis of the cipher, where we incorporated exact probabilities rather than just the number of active S-boxes into the model. Through the MILP analysis, we were able to find differential and linear distinguishers for up to 5 rounds of FUTURE, extending the known distinguishers of the cipher by one round.
Giovanni Deligios, Chen-Da Liu-Zhang
ePrint Report
\emph{Perfectly-secure} SMT protocols in synchronous and asynchronous networks are resilient up to $\ell/2$ and $\ell/3$ corruptions respectively. In this work, we ask whether it is possible to achieve a perfect SMT protocol that simultaneously tolerates $t_s < \ell/2$ corruptions when the network is synchronous, and $t_a < \ell/3$ when the network is asynchronous.
We completely resolve this question by showing that perfect SMT is possible if and only if $2t_a + t_s < \ell$. In addition, we provide a concretely round-efficient solution for the (slightly worse) trade-off $t_a + 2t_s < \ell$.
As a direct application of our results, following the recent work by Appan, Chandramouli, and Choudhury [PODC'22], we obtain an $n$-party perfectly-secure synchronous multi-party computation protocol with asynchronous fallback over any network with connectivity $\ell$, as long as $t_a + 3t_s
20 October 2022
atlanTTic Research Center, Universidade de Vigo; Vigo, Spain
Job Posting
2 PhD positions are available at the AtlanTTic Research Center (https://atlanttic.uvigo.es/en/) from the Universidade de Vigo. The positions are available to start at the end of 2022, covering a duration of 3-4 years, and including travel budget for attendance to conference and summer schools.
The workplace is in the city of Vigo, being ranked by OCU as the Spanish city with the highest life quality (https://www.idealista.com/en/news/lifestyle-in-spain/2021/06/02/13426-quality-of-life-in-spain-spanish-cities-with-the-best-and-worst-quality-of-life).
Both positions are funded by TRUMPET, which is an European project whose aim is to research and develop novel privacy enhancement methods for Federated Learning, and to deliver a scalable Federated AI service platform for the analysis of cross-border European datasets. The privacy guarantees of the platform will be validated for the scenario of cancer data coming from different European hospitals.
PhD candidates will contribute to two different central aspects: (1) research and implementation of secure methods for machine learning, and (2) measure the existing privacy leakage in federated learning scenarios.
Intended tasks:
Your profile:
Closing date for applications:
Contact: For more details, send an email to Alberto Pedrouzo (apedrouzo@gts.uvigo.es).
a16z Crypto (Andreessen-Horowitz)
Job Posting
a16z Crypto Research is a new kind of multidisciplinary lab that bridges the worlds of academic theory and industry practice to advance the science and technology of the next generation of the internet. In addition to fundamental research, we collaborate with portfolio companies to solve hard technical and conceptual problems. We are seeking students with a strong research background and an interest in blockchains and web3 to join the group for the summer. Specific research areas of interest include cryptography, security, distributed computing, economics, incentives, finance, governance, market and mechanism design. This list is not exhaustive and we encourage applicants with different backgrounds who may have unique perspectives on the space to apply.
Responsibilities
-Pursue fundamental research on topics relevant to the firm
-Work with portfolio companies on technical research problems
-Contribute to blog posts, white papers, and other public expository content
-Meet with visitors from academia and industry and attend seminars
A typical schedule will have an intern spending ⅓ of their time working with the portfolio, ⅓ of the time pursuing personal research interests, and ⅓ of their time meeting with visitors/attending seminars, etc.
In-person residency required in New York, NY
Duration of internship: May 30–August 18, 2023 (minimum residency 10 weeks, maximum 12 weeks)
Preferred Qualifications A typical successful candidate is:
-Enrolled in a quantitative PhD program such as computer science, mathematics, economics, etc. (Exceptional masters and undergraduate students will also be considered.)
-Passionate and knowledgeable about blockchains/Web3 and their underlying technologies.
-Familiar with fundamental research and publishing in peer-reviewed conferences and journals.
Letters of recommendation (1-2 letters, optional): recommenders should email their letters of support to crypto-research-applications@a16z.com, with the name of the applicant in the subject line.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Tim Roughgarden
More information: https://a16z.com/about/jobs/?gh_jid=5345713003
Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Department of Computer Science and Mathematics, Spain
Job Posting
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Dr. Rolando Trujillo
Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain.
Job Posting
This position is funded by a 4-years PhD scholarship (that is equivalent to the former FPI grants).
Candidates who have completed (or are about to complete) a master in mathematics, computer science, or computer engineering are welcome to start the application by sending an email with a CV and a motivation letter to oriol.farras@urv.cat before November 15. Applicants should be able to start the PhD between January and July 2023. After receiving the email, we will provide more details about the grant application and the potential research projects. Students with a background in cryptography, algebraic geometry, matroid theory, or complexity theory are especially encouraged to apply.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Oriol Farràs, oriol.farras@urv.cat
https://crises-deim.urv.cat/oriolfv/
TCC
Early Registration Closes on Oct 23rd https://tcc.iacr.org/2022/registration.php
18 October 2022
University of St. Gallen, Switzerland
Job Posting
Key Responsibilities:
- Perform exciting and challenging research in the domain of information security and cryptography
- Support and assist in teaching computer security and cryptography courses
- The PhD student is expected to have a MSc degree or equivalent, and strong background in cryptography, network security and mathematics
- Experience in one or more domains such as cryptography, design of protocols, secure multi-party computation and differential privacy is beneficial
- Excellent programming skills
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Katerina Mitrokotsa
IT University of Copenhagen
Job Posting
- 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
Job Posting
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Nitesh Saxena
17 October 2022
University of Bern, Switzerland
Job Posting
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
Job Posting
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
ePrint Report
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
ePrint Report
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
Job Posting
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
Job Posting
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
Job Posting
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
Job Posting
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
Job Posting
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