International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Event date: 23 March to 24 March 2024
Submission deadline: 22 November 2023
Notification: 22 January 2024

We are looking for a postdoc to work with us on lattice-based cryptography. Broadly speaking, this is to build/analyse practical post-quantum privacy-preserving primitives and protocols.

Job ad: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/076525-research-fellowresearch-associate-in-cryptography

Closing date: 31 January 2024

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Martin Albrecht <martin.albrecht@kcl.ac.uk>

More information: https://martinralbrecht.wordpress.com/2023/10/12/postdoc-positions/

Aarhus University - an international top-100 University - has made an ambitious strategic investment in recruitment to expand the Department of Computer Science. We expect to hire four candidates in 2024. The department has world-class research groups within "Algorithms, Data Structures and Foundations of Machine Learning", “Data-Intensive Systems", "Cryptography and Security", "Computational Complexity and Game Theory", "Logic and Semantics", "Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction", “Human Computer Interaction (HCI)", and "Programming Languages”. We encourage applicants to strengthen the above groups. Additionally, we in particular wish to expand competencies within Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence, NLP/Large Language Models, Quantum Computing, Quantum Cryptography, Economics and Computation, Systems and Networks, as well as Software Engineering. We are looking for both tenure-track Assistant professors and Associate professors, and we generally encourage candidates within all areas of Computer Science – not restricted to the above – to apply.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Kaj Grønbæk, Professor, Head of Department, e-mail: kgronbak@cs.au.dk

More information: https://cs.au.dk/about-us/vacancies/job/aarhus-university-is-hiring-assistant-and-associate-professors-to-contribute-to-the-future-of-the-department-of-computer-science-2

We are looking for a strong PhD-candidate. There may be possibilities for a postdoc position on the project “Verified voting protocols and blockchains”.

Deadline:1 November 2023. https://phd.nat.au.dk/for-applicants/open-calls/november-2023/verified-voting-protocols-and-blockchains

The PhD positions include full tuition waiver and a very competitive scholarship. Aarhus University provides international students with a safe and stable environment, a high standard of living and a wealth of social opportunities. Besides having an excellent reputation that enables our PhD graduates to find outstanding employment prospects, Aarhus University offers attractive working conditions, research support and campus resources.

https://cs.au.dk/education/phd/

https://international.au.dk/

This project is supported by the Danish DIREC research center. It is a collaboration between Aarhus University, the Alexandra Institute and Concordium ApS. 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 research proposal is to investigate voting protocols and their relation to blockchains. The team will work on security proofs of these protocols and their implementations.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Bas Spitters

More information: https://phd.nat.au.dk/for-applicants/open-calls/november-2023/verified-voting-protocols-and-blockchains

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. Research interns will have the opportunity to learn from the firm’s investment and engineering teams, although this is a research role with no responsibility for investment decisions. 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 (both micro and macro), incentives, quantitative finance, political science and governance, and 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.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Joseph Bonneau

More information: https://a16z.com/about/jobs/?gh_jid=5766443003

We optimise the verification of the SQIsign signature scheme. By using field extensions in the signing procedure, we are able to significantly increase the amount of available rational $2$-power torsion in verification, which achieves a significant speed-up. This, moreover, allows several other speed-ups on the level of curve arithmetic. We show that the synergy between these high-level and low-level improvements gives significant improvements, making verification $2.65$ times faster, or up to $4.40$ times when using size-speed trade-offs, without degrading the performance of signing.

Fault attacks impose a serious threat against the practical implementations of cryptographic algorithms. Statistical Ineffective Fault Attacks (SIFA), exploiting the dependency between the secret data and the fault propagation overcame many of the known countermeasures. Later, several countermeasures have been proposed to tackle this attack using error detection methods. However, the efficiency of the countermeasures, in part governed by the number of error checks, still remains a challenge. In this work, we propose a fault countermeasure, StaTI, based on threshold implementations and linear encoding techniques. The proposed countermeasure protects the implementations of cryptographic algorithms against both side-channel and fault adversaries in a non-combined attack setting. We present a new composable notion, stability, to protect a threshold implementation against a formal gate/register-faulting adversary. Stability ensures fault propagation, making a single error check of the output suffice. To illustrate the stability notion, first, we provide stable encodings of the XOR and AND gates. Then, we present techniques to encode threshold implementations of S-boxes, and provide stable encodings of some quadratic S-boxes together with their security and performance evaluation. Additionally, we propose general encoding techniques to transform a threshold implementation of any function (e.g., non-injective functions) to a stable one. We then provide an encoding technique to use in symmetric primitives which encodes state elements together significantly reducing the encoded state size. Finally, we used StaTI to implement a secure Keccak on FPGA and report on its efficiency.

At ASIACRYPT 2019, Zhang proposed a near collision attack on A5/1 claiming to recover the 64-bit A5/1 state with a time complexity around $2^{32}$ cipher ticks with negligible memory requirements. Soon after its proposal, Zhang's near collision attack was severely challenged by Derbez \etal who claimed that Zhang's attack cannot have a time complexity lower than Golic's memoryless guess-and-determine attack dating back to EUROCRYPT 1997. In this paper, we study both the guess-and-determine and the near collision attacks for recovering A5/1 states with negligible memory complexities. Firstly, we propose a new guessing technique called the \emph{move guessing technique} that can construct linear equation filters in a more efficient manner. Such a technique can be applied to both guess-and-determine and collision attacks for efficiency improvements. Secondly, we take the filtering strength of the linear equation systems into account for complexity analysis. Such filtering strength are evaluated with practical experiments making the complexities more convincing. Based on such new techniques, we are able to give 2 new guess-and-determine attacks on A5/1: the 1st attack recovers the internal state $\vec{s}^0$ with time complexity $2^{43.92}$; the 2nd one recovers a different state $\vec{s}^1$ with complexity $2^{43.25}$. We also revisit Golic's guess-and-determine attack and Zhang's near collision attacks. According to our detailed analysis, the complexity of Golic's $\vec{s}^1$ recovery attack is no lower than $2^{46.04}$, higher than the previously believed $2^{43}$. On the other hand, Zhang's near collision attack recovers $\vec{s}^0$ with the time complexity $2^{53.19}$: such a complexity can be further lowered to $2^{50.78}$ with our move guessing technique.

The security of blockchain protocols is a combination of two properties: safety and liveness. It is well known that no blockchain protocol can provide both to sleepy (intermittently online) clients under adversarial majority. However, safety is more critical in that a single safety violation can cause users to lose money. At the same time, liveness must not be lost forever. We show that, in a synchronous network, it is possible to maintain safety for all clients even during adversarial majority, and recover liveness after honest majority is restored. Our solution takes the form of a recovery gadget that can be applied to any protocol with certificates (such as HotStuff, Streamlet, Tendermint, and their variants).

Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machines (ZKVMs) have gained traction in recent years due to their potential applications in a variety of areas, particularly blockchain ecosystems. Despite tremendous progress on ZKVMs in the industry, no formal definitions or security proofs have been established in the literature. Due to this lack of formalization, existing protocols exhibit significant discrepancies in terms of problem definitions and performance metrics, making it difficult to analyze and compare these advancements, or to trust the security of the increasingly complex ZKVM implementations.

In this work, we focus on random-access memory, an influential and expensive component of ZKVMs. Specifically, we investigate the state-of-the-art protocols for validating the correct functioning of memory, which we refer to as the \emph{memory consistency checks}. Isolating these checks from the rest of the system allows us to formalize their definition and security notion. Furthermore, we summarize the state-of-the-art constructions using the Polynomial IOP model and formally prove their security. Observing that the bottleneck of existing designs lies in sorting the entire memory trace, we break away from this paradigm and propose a novel memory consistency check, dubbed $\mathsf{Permem}$. $\mathsf{Permem}$ bypasses this bottleneck by introducing a technique called the address cycle method, which requires fewer building blocks and---after instantiating the building blocks with state-of-the-art constructions---fewer online polynomial oracles and evaluation queries. In addition, we propose $\mathsf{gcq}$, a new construction for the lookup argument---a key building block of the memory consistency check, which costs fewer online polynomial oracles than the state-of-the-art construction $\mathsf{cq}$.

We propose Cornucopia, a distributed randomness beacon protocol combining accumulators and verifiable delay functions. Cornucopia extends the Unicorn protocol of Lenstra and Wesolowski, utilizing an accumulator to enable efficient verification by each participant that their randomness contribution has been included in the beacon output. The security of this construction reduces to a novel property of accumulators, insertion security. We first show that not all accumulators are insertion-secure. We then prove that common constructions (Merkle trees and RSA accumulators) are naturally insertion-secure. Finally, we give a generic transformation from any universal accumulator (supporting non-membership proofs) to an insertion-secure accumulator, albeit with an efficiency loss proportional to the security parameter.

Threshold signature is one of the most important cryptographic primitives in distributed systems. A popular choice of threshold signature scheme is the BLS threshold signature introduced by Boldyreva (PKC'03). Some attractive properties of Boldyreva's threshold signature are that the signatures are unique and short, the signing process is non-interactive, and the verification process is identical to that of non-threshold BLS. These properties have resulted in its practical adoption in several decentralized systems. However, despite its popularity and wide adoption, up until recently, the Boldyreva scheme has been proven secure only against a static adversary. Very recently, Bacho and Loss (CCS'22) presented the first proof of adaptive security for Boldyreva's threshold signature, but they have to rely on strong and non-standard assumptions such as the hardness of one-more discrete log (OMDL) and the Algebraic Group Model~(AGM).

In this paper, we present the first adaptively secure threshold BLS signature scheme that relies on the hardness of DDH and co-CDH in asymmetric pairing group in the Random Oracle Model (ROM). Our signature scheme also has non-interactive signing, compatibility with non-threshold BLS verification, and practical efficiency like Boldyreva's scheme. Moreover, to achieve static security, our scheme only needs the hardness of CDH in the ROM, which is the same as the standard non-threshold BLS signature. These properties make our protocol a suitable candidate for practical adoption with the added benefit of provable adaptive security. We also present an efficient distributed key generation (DKG) protocol to set up the signing keys for our signature scheme. We implement our scheme in Go and evaluate its signing and aggregation costs.

Private information retrieval (PIR) allows a client to read data from a server, without revealing which information they are interested in. A PIR is doubly efficient if the server runtime is, after a one-time pre-processing, sublinear in the database size. A recent breakthrough result from Lin, Mook, and Wichs [STOC’23] proposed the first-doubly efficient PIR with (online) server computation poly-logarithmic in the size of the database, assuming the hardness of the standard Ring-LWE problem.

In this work, we consider the problem of doubly efficient batched PIR (DEBPIR), where the client wishes to download multiple entries. This problem arises naturally in many practical applications of PIR, or when the database contains large entries. Our main result is a construction of DEBPIR where the amortized communication and server computation overhead is $\tilde{O}(1)$, from the Ring-LWE problem. This represents an exponential improvement compared with known constructions, and it is optimal up to poly-logarithmic factors in the security parameter. Interestingly, the server’s online operations are entirely combinatorial and all algebraic computations are done in the pre-processing or delegated to the client.

In the rapidly advancing domain of artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, powered by the GPT-4 model, has emerged as a state-of-the-art interactive agent, exhibiting substantial capabilities across various domains. This paper aims to assess the efficacy of GPT-4 in addressing and solving problems found within cryptographic examinations. We devised a multi-faceted methodology, presenting the model with a series of cryptographic questions of varying complexities derived from real academic examinations. Our evaluation encompasses both classical and modern cryptographic challenges, focusing on the model's ability to understand, interpret, and generate correct solutions while discerning its limitations. The model was challenged with a spectrum of cryptographic tasks, earning 201 out of 208 points by solving fundamental queries inspired by an oral exam, 80.5 out of 90 points on a written Crypto 1 exam, and 287 out of 385 points on advanced exercises from the Crypto 2 course. The results demonstrate that while GPT-4 shows significant promise in grasping fundamental cryptographic concepts and techniques, certain intricate problems necessitate domain-specific knowledge that may sometimes lie beyond the model's general training. Insights from this study can provide educators, researchers, and examiners with a deeper understanding of how cutting-edge AI models can be both an asset and a potential concern in academic settings related to cryptology. To enhance the clarity and coherence of our work, we utilized ChatGPT-4 to help us in formulating sentences in this paper.

The application of masking, widely regarded as the most robust and reliable countermeasure against Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) attacks, has been the subject of extensive research across a range of cryptographic algorithms, especially AES. However, the implementation cost associated with applying such a countermeasure can be significant and even in some scenarios infeasible due to considerations such as area and latency overheads, as well as the need for fresh randomness to ensure the security properties of the resulting design. Most of these overheads originate from the ability to maintain security in the presence of physical defaults such as glitches and transitions. Among several schemes with a trade-off between such overheads, RAMBAM, presented at CHES 2022, offers an ultra-low latency in terms of the number of clock cycles. It is dedicated to the AES and utilizes redundant representations of the finite field elements to enhance protection against both passive and active physical attacks.

In this paper, we have a deeper look at this technique and provide a comprehensive analysis. The original authors reported that the number of required traces to mount a successful attack increases exponentially with the size of the redundant representation. We however examine their scheme from theoretical point of view. More specifically, we investigate the relationship between RAMBAM and the well-established Boolean masking and, based on this, prove the insecurity of RAMBAM. Through the examples and use cases, we assess the leakage of the scheme in practice and use verification tools to demonstrate that RAMBAM does not necessarily offer adequate protection against SCA attacks neither in theory nor in practice. Confirmed by real-world experiments, we additionally highlight that -- if no dedicated facility is incorporated -- the RAMBAM designs are susceptible to fault-injection attacks despite providing some degree of protection against a sophisticated attack vector, i.e., SIFA.

Byzantine atomic broadcast (ABC) is at the heart of permissioned blockchains and various multi-party computation protocols. We resolve a long-standing open problem in ABC, presenting the first information-theoretic (IT) and signature-free asynchronous ABC protocol that achieves optimal $O(n^2)$ messages and $O(1)$ expected time. Our ABC protocol adopts a new design, relying on a reduction from---perhaps surprisingly---a somewhat neglected primitive called multivalued Byzantine agreement (MBA).

Cheater identification in secure multi-party computation (MPC) allows the honest parties to agree upon the identity of a cheating party, in case the protocol aborts. In the context of a dishonest majority, this becomes especially critical, as it serves to thwart denial-of-service attacks and mitigate known impossibility results on ensuring fairness and guaranteed output delivery.

In this work, we present a new, lightweight approach to achieving identifiable abort in dishonest majority MPC. We avoid all of the heavy machinery used in previous works, instead relying on a careful combination of lightweight detection mechanisms and techniques from state-of-the-art protocols secure with (non-identifiable) abort.

At the core of our construction is a homomorphic, multi-receiver commitment scheme secure with identifiable abort. This commitment scheme can be constructed from cheap vector oblivious linear evaluation protocols based on learning parity with noise. To support cheater identification, we design a general compilation technique, similar to a compiler of Ishai et al. (Crypto 2014), but avoid its requirement for adaptive security of the underlying protocol.

Instead, we rely on a different (and seemingly easier to achieve) property we call online extractability, which may be of independent interest. Our MPC protocol can be viewed as a version of the BDOZ MPC scheme (Bendlin et al., Eurocrypt 2011) based on pairwise information-theoretic MACs, enhanced to support cheater identification and a highly efficient preprocessing phase, essentially as efficient as the non-identifiable protocol of Le Mans (Rachuri & Scholl, Crypto 2022).

In post-quantum cryptography, Learning With Errors (LWE) is one of the dominant underlying mathematical problems. The dual attack is one of the main strategies for solving the LWE problem, and it has recently gathered significant attention within the research community. A series of studies initially suggested that it might be more efficient than the other main strategy, the primal attack. Then, a subsequent work by Ducas and Pulles (Crypto’23) raised doubts on the estimated complexity of such an approach. The dual attack consists of a reduction part and a distinguishing part. When estimating the cost of the distinguishing part, one has to estimate the expected cost of enumerating over a certain number of positions of the secret key.

Our contribution consists of giving a polynomial-time approach for calculating the expected complexity of such an enumeration procedure. This allows us to decrease the estimated cost of this procedure and, hence, of the whole attack both classically and quantumly. In addition, we explore different enumeration strategies to achieve some further improvements. Our work is independent from the questions raised by Ducas and Pulles, which do not concern the estimation of the enumeration procedure in the dual attack. As our method of calculating the expected cost of enumeration is fairly general, it might be of independent interest in other areas of cryptanalysis or even in other research areas.

The escalation of hazards to safety and hijacking of digital networks are among the strongest perilous difficulties that must be addressed in the present day. Numerous safety procedures were set up to track and recognize any illicit activity on the network's infrastructure. IDS are the best way to resist and recognize intrusions on internet connections and digital technologies. To classify network traffic as normal or anomalous, Machine Learning (ML) classifiers are increasingly utilized. An IDS with machine learning increases the accuracy with which security attacks are detected. This paper focuses on intrusion detection systems (IDSs) analysis using ML techniques. IDSs utilizing ML techniques are efficient and precise at identifying network assaults. In data with large dimensional spaces, however, the efficacy of these systems degrades. correspondingly, the case is essential to execute a feasible feature removal technique capable of getting rid of characteristics that have little effect on the classification process. In this paper, we analyze the KDD CUP-'99' intrusion detection dataset used for training and validating ML models. Then, we implement ML classifiers such as “Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, K-Nearest Neighbour, Naïve Bayes, Bernoulli Naïve Bayes, Multinomial Naïve Bayes, XG-Boost Classifier, Ada-Boost, Random Forest, SVM, Rocchio classifier, Ridge, Passive-Aggressive classifier, ANN besides Perceptron (PPN), the optimal classifiers are determined by comparing the results of Stochastic Gradient Descent and back-propagation neural networks for IDS”, Conventional categorization indicators, such as "accuracy, precision, recall, and the f1-measure", have been used to evaluate the performance of the ML classification algorithms.

The Journal of Cryptology will have a Topical Collection “Modern Zero-Knowledge Protocols”.

The CFPs are available at the URL: https://iacr.org/jofc/TopicalCollection-mzkp.html