International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Physical security is an important aspect of devices for which an adversary can manipulate the physical execution environment. Recently, more and more attention has been directed towards a security model that combines the capabilities of passive and active physical attacks, i.e., an adversary that performs fault-injection and side-channel analysis at the same time. Implementing countermeasures against such a powerful adversary is not only costly but also requires the skillful combination of masking and redundancy to counteract all reciprocal effects.

In this work, we propose a new methodology to generate combined-secure circuits. We show how to transform TI-like constructions to resist any adversary with the capability to tamper with internal gates and probe internal wires. For the resulting protection scheme, we can prove the combined security in a well-established theoretical security model.

Since the transformation preserves the advantages of TI-like structures, the resulting circuits prove to be more efficient in the number of required bits of randomness (up to 100%), the latency in clock cycles (up to 40%), and even the area for pipelined designs (up to 40%) than the state of the art for an adversary restricted to manipulating a single gate and probing a single wire.

The Alternating Trilinear Form Equivalence (ATFE) problem was recently used by Tang et al. as a hardness assumption in the design of a Fiat-Shamir digital signature scheme ALTEQ. The scheme was submitted to the additional round for digital signatures of the NIST standardization process for post-quantum cryptography.

ATFE is a hard equivalence problem known to be in the class of equivalence problems that includes, for instance, the Tensor Isomorphism (TI), Quadratic Maps Linear Equivalence (QMLE) and the Matrix Code Equivalence (MCE) problems. Due to the increased cryptographic interest, the understanding of its practical hardness has also increased in the last couple of years. Currently, there are several combinatorial and algebraic algorithms for solving it, the best of which is a graph-theoretic algorithm that also includes an algebraic subroutine.

In this paper, we take a purely algebraic approach to the ATFE problem, but we use a coding theory perspective to model the problem. This modelling was introduced earlier for the MCE problem. Using it, we improve the cost of algebraic attacks against ATFE compared to previously known ones.

Taking into account the algebraic structure of alternating trilinear forms, we show that the obtained system has less variables but also less equations than for MCE and gives rise to structural degree-3 syzygies. Under the assumption that outside of these syzygies the system behaves semi-regularly, we provide a concrete, non-asymptotic complexity estimate of the performance of our algebraic attack. Our results show that the complexity of our attack is below the estimated security levels of ALTEQ by more than 20 bits for NIST level I (and more for the others), thus the scheme requires re-parametrization for all three NIST security levels.

A Bitcoin miner who owns a sufficient amount of mining power can perform selfish mining to increase his relative revenue. Studies have demonstrated that the time-averaged profit of a selfish miner starts to rise once the mining difficulty level gets adjusted in favor of the attacker. Selfish mining profitability lies in the fact that orphan blocks are not incorporated into the current version of Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment mechanism (DAM). Therefore, it is believed that considering the count of orphan blocks in the DAM can result in selfish mining unprofitability. In this paper, we disprove this belief by providing a formal analysis of the selfish mining time-averaged profit. We present a precise definition of the orphan blocks that can be incorporated into calculating the next epoch's target and then introduce two modified versions of DAM in which both main-chain blocks and orphan blocks are incorporated. We propose two versions of smart intermittent selfish mining, where the first one dominates the normal intermittent selfish mining and the second one results in selfish mining profitability under the modified DAMs. Moreover, we present the orphan exclusion attack with the help of which the attacker can stop honest miners from reporting the orphan blocks. Using combinatorial tools, we analyze the profitability of selfish mining accompanied by the orphan exclusion attack under the modified DAMs. Our result shows that even when considering the orphan blocks in the DAM, normal selfish mining can still be profitable; however, the level of profitability under the modified DAMs is significantly lower than that observed under the current version of Bitcoin DAM.

Causal reasoning plays an important role in the comprehension of communication, but it has been elusive so far how causality should be properly preserved by instant messaging services. To the best of our knowledge, causality preservation is not even treated as a desired security property by most (if not all) existing secure messaging protocols like Signal. This is probably due to the intuition that causality seems already preserved when all received messages are intact and displayed according to their sending order. Our starting point is to notice that this intuition is wrong.

Until now, for messaging channels (where conversations take place), both the proper causality model and the provably secure constructions have been left open. Our work fills this gap, with the goal to facilitate the formal understanding of causality preservation in messaging.

First, we focus on the common two-user secure messaging channels and model the desired causality preservation property. We take the popular Signal protocol as an example and analyze the causality security of its cryptographic core (the double-ratchet mechanism). We show its inadequacy with a simple causality attack, then fix it such that the resulting Signal channel is causality-preserving, even in a strong sense that guarantees post-compromise security. Our fix is actually generic: it can be applied to any bidirectional channel to gain strong causality security.

Then, we model causality security for the so-called message franking channels. Such a channel additionally enables end users to report individual abusive messages to a server (e.g., the service provider), where this server relays the end-to-end-encrypted communication between users. Causality security in this setting further allows the server to retrieve the necessary causal dependencies of each reported message, essentially extending isolated reported messages to message flows. This has great security merit for dispute resolution, because a benign message may be deemed abusive when isolated from the context. As an example, we apply our model to analyze Facebook’s message franking scheme. We show that a malicious user can easily trick Facebook (i.e., the server) to accuse an innocent user. Then we fix this issue by amending the underlying message franking channel to preserve the desired causality.

Weak forward secrecy (wFS) of authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocols is a passive variant of (full) forward secrecy (FS). A natural mechanism to upgrade from wFS to FS is the use of key confirmation messages which compute a message authentication code (MAC) over the transcript. Unfortunately, Gellert, Gjøsteen, Jacobson and Jager (GGJJ, CRYPTO 2023) show that this mechanism inherently incurs a loss proportional to the number of users, leading to an overall non-tight reduction, even if wFS was established using a tight reduction.

Inspired by GGJJ, we propose a new notion, called one-way verifiable weak forward secrecy (OW-VwFS), and prove that OW-VwFS can be transformed tightly to FS using key confirmation in the random oracle model (ROM). To implement our generic transformation, we show that several tightly wFS AKE protocols additionally satisfy our OW-VwFS notion tightly. We highlight that using the recent lattice-based protocol from Pan, Wagner, and Zeng (CRYPTO 2023) can give us the first lattice-based tightly FS AKE via key confirmation in the classical random oracle model. Besides this, we also obtain a Decisional-Diffie-Hellman-based protocol that is considerably more efficient than the previous ones.

Finally, we lift our study on FS via key confirmation to the quantum random oracle model (QROM). While our security reduction is overall non-tight, it matches the best existing bound for wFS in the QROM (Pan, Wagner, and Zeng, ASIACRYPT 2023), namely, it is square-root- and session-tight. Our analysis is in the multi-challenge setting, and it is more realistic than the single-challenge setting as in Pan et al..

Collision-resistant hashing, a fundamental primitive in modern cryptography, ensures that there is no efficient way to find distinct inputs that produce the same hash value. This property underpins the security of various cryptographic applications, making it crucial to understand its complexity. The complexity of this problem is well-understood in the classical setting and $\Theta(N^{1/2})$ queries are needed to find a collision. However, the advent of quantum computing has introduced new challenges since quantum adversaries - equipped with the power of quantum queries - can find collisions much more efficiently. Brassard, Höyer and Tapp and Aaronson and Shi established that full-scale quantum adversaries require $\Theta(N^{1/3})$ queries to find a collision, prompting a need for longer hash outputs, which impacts efficiency in terms of the key lengths needed for security.

This paper explores the implications of quantum attacks in the Noisy-Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. In this work, we investigate three different models for NISQ algorithms and achieve tight bounds for all of them: (1) A hybrid algorithm making adaptive quantum or classical queries but with a limited quantum query budget, or (2) A quantum algorithm with access to a noisy oracle, subject to a dephasing or depolarizing channel, or (3) A hybrid algorithm with an upper bound on its maximum quantum depth; i.e., a classical algorithm aided by low-depth quantum circuits.

In fact, our results handle all regimes between NISQ and full-scale quantum computers. Previously, only results for the pre-image search problem were known for these models by Sun and Zheng, Rosmanis, Chen, Cotler, Huang and Li while nothing was known about the collision finding problem.

Along with our main results, we develop an information-theoretic framework for recording query transcripts of quantum-classical algorithms. The main feature of this framework is that it allows us to record queries in two incompatible bases - classical queries in the standard basis and quantum queries in the Fourier basis - consistently. We call the framework the hybrid compressed oracle as it naturally interpolates between the classical way of recording queries and the compressed oracle framework of Zhandry for recording quantum queries.

Hudoba proposed a public key encryption (PKE) scheme and conjectured its security to be based on the Planted Clique problem. In this note, we show that this scheme is not secure. We do so by devising an efficient algorithm for the even neighbor independent set problem proposed by Hudoba. This leaves open the possibility of building PKE based on Planted Clique.

EdDSA, standardized by both IRTF and NIST, is a variant of the well-known Schnorr signature based on Edwards curves, and enjoys the benefit of statelessly and deterministically deriving nonces (i.e., it does not require reliable source of randomness or state continuity). Recently, NIST calls for multi-party threshold EdDSA signatures in one mode of deriving nonce statelessly and deterministically and verifying such derivation via zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. Multi-party full-threshold EdDSA signatures in the dishonest-majority malicious setting have the advantage of strong security guarantee, and specially cover the two-party case. However, it is challenging to translate the stateless and deterministic benefit of EdDSA to the multi-party setting, as no fresh randomness is available for the protocol execution.

We present the notion of information-theoretic message authenticated codes (IT-MACs) over groups in the multi-verifier setting, and adopt the recent pseudorandom correlation function (PCF) to generate IT-MACs statelessly and deterministically. Furthermore, we generalize the two-party IT-MACs-based ZK protocol by Baum et al. (Crypto'21) into the multi-verifier setting, which may be of independent interest. Together with multi-verifier extended doubly-authenticated bits (mv-edabits) with errors, we design a multi-verifier zero-knowledge (MVZK) protocol to derive nonces statelessly and deterministically. Building upon the MVZK protocol, we propose a stateless deterministic multi-party EdDSA signature, tolerating all-but-one malicious corruptions. Compared to the state-of-the-art multi-party EdDSA signature by Garillot et al. (Crypto'21), we improve communication cost by a factor of $61\times$, at the cost of increasing computation cost by about $2.25\times$ and requiring three extra rounds.

The iMessage PQ3 protocol is an end-to-end encrypted messaging protocol designed for exchanging data in long-lived sessions between two devices. It aims to provide classical and post-quantum confidentiality for forward secrecy and post-compromise secrecy, as well as classical authentication. Its initial authenticated key exchange is constructed from digital signatures plus elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman and post-quantum key exchanges; to derive per-message keys on an ongoing basis, it employs an adaptation of the Signal double ratchet that includes a post-quantum key encapsulation mechanism. This paper presents the cryptographic details of the PQ3 protocol and gives a reductionist security analysis by adapting the multi-stage key exchange security analysis of Signal by Cohn-Gordon et al. (J. Cryptology, 2020). The analysis shows that PQ3 provides confidentiality with forward secrecy and post-compromise security against both classical and quantum adversaries, in both the initial key exchange as well as the continuous rekeying phase of the protocol.

Recent work has introduced the "Quantum-Computation Classical-Communication" (QCCC) (Chung et. al.) setting for cryptography. There has been some evidence that One Way Puzzles (OWPuzz) are the natural central cryptographic primitive for this setting (Khurana and Tomer). For a primitive to be considered central it should have several characteristics. It should be well behaved (which for this paper we will think of as having amplification, combiners, and universal constructions); it should be implied by a wide variety of other primitives; and it should be equivalent to some class of useful primitives. We present combiners, correctness and security amplifica- tion, and a universal construction for OWPuzz. Our proof of security amplification uses a new and cleaner version construction of EFI from OWPuzz (in comparison to the result of Khurana and Tomer) that generalizes to weak OWPuzz and is the most technically involved section of the paper. It was previously known that OWPuzz are implied by other primitives of interest including commitments, symmetric key encryp- tion, one way state generators (OWSG), and therefore pseudorandom states (PRS). However we are able to rule out OWPuzz’s equivalence to many of these primitives by showing a black box separation between general OWPuzz and a restricted class of OWPuzz (those with efficient verification, which we call EV − OWPuzz). We then show that EV − OWPuzz are also implied by most of these primitives, which separates them from OWPuzz as well. This separation also separates extending PRS from highly compressing PRS answering an open question of Ananth et. al.

This paper introduces the first adaptively secure streaming functional encryption (sFE) scheme for P/Poly. sFE stands as an evolved variant of traditional functional encryption (FE), catering specifically to contexts with vast and/or dynamically evolving data sets. sFE is designed for applications where data arrives in a streaming fashion and is computed on in an iterative manner as the stream arrives. Unlike standard FE, in sFE: (1) encryption is possible without knowledge of the full data set, (2) partial decryption is possible given only a prefix of the input. Guan, Korb, and Sahai introduced this concept in their recent publication [CRYPTO 2023], where they constructed an sFE scheme for P/Poly using a compact standard FE scheme for the same. However, their sFE scheme only achieved semi-adaptive-function-selective security, which constrains the adversary to obtain all functional keys prior to seeing any ciphertext for the challenge stream. This limitation severely limits the scenarios where sFE can be applied, and therefore fails to provide a suitable theoretical basis for sFE. In contrast, the adaptive security model empowers the adversary to arbitrarily interleave requests for functional keys with ciphertexts related to the challenge stream. Guan, Korb, and Sahai identified achieving adaptive security for sFE as the key question left open by their work. We resolve this open question positively by constructing an adaptively secure sFE construction from indistinguishability obfuscation for P/Poly and injective PRGs. By combining our work with that of Jain, Lin, and Sahai [STOC 2021, EUROCRYPT 2022], we obtain the first adaptively secure sFE scheme for P/Poly based on sub-exponential hardness of well-studied computational problems

Inspired by range-check trick from recent Latticefold paper we construct elliptic-curve based IVC capable of simulating non-native arithmetic efficiently.

We explain the general principle (which can be applied to both Protostar and Hypernova), and describe the Wrongfield ARithmetic for Protostar folding in details.

Our construction supports circuits over mutilple non-native fields simultaneously and allows interfacing between them using range-checked elements.

WARPfold can be used to warp between different proof systems and construct folding schemes over curves not admitting a dual partner (such as BLS12-381).

FuLeeca is a signature scheme submitted to the recent NIST call for additional signatures. It is an efficient hash-and-sign scheme based on quasi-cyclic codes in the Lee metric and resembles the lattice-based signature Falcon. FuLeeca proposes a so-called concentration step within the signing procedure to avoid leakage of secret-key information from the signatures. However, FuLeeca is still vulnerable to learning attacks, which were first observed for lattice-based schemes. We present three full key-recovery attacks by exploiting the proximity of the code-based FuLeeca scheme to lattice-based primitives. More precisely, we use a few signatures to extract an $n/2$-dimensional circulant sublattice of the given length-$n$ code, that still contains the exceptionally short secret-key vector. This significantly reduces the classical attack cost and, in addition, leads to a full key recovery in quantum-polynomial time. Furthermore, we exploit a bias in the concentration procedure to classically recover the full key for any security level with at most 175,000 signatures in less than an hour.

The Nostradamus attack was originally proposed as a security vulnerability for a hash function by Kelsey and Kohno at EUROCRYPT 2006. It requires the attacker to commit to a hash value y of an iterated hash function H. Subsequently, upon being provided with a message prefix P, the adversary’s task is to identify a suffix S such that H(P||S) equals y. Kelsey and Kohno demonstrated a herding attack requiring $O(\sqrt{n}\cdot 2^{2n/3})$ evaluations of the compression function of H, where n represents the output and state size of the hash, placing this attack between preimage attacks and collision searches in terms of complexity. At ASIACRYPT 2022, Benedikt et al. transform Kelsey and Kohno’s attack into a quantum variant, decreasing the time complexity from $O(\sqrt{n}\cdot 2^{2n/3})$ to $O(\sqrt[3]{n}\cdot 2^{3n/7})$. At ToSC 2023, Zhang et al. proposed the first dedicated Nostradamus attack on AES-like hashing in both classical and quantum settings. In this paper, we have made revisions to the multi-target technique incorporated into the meet-in-the-middle automatic search framework. This modification leads to a decrease in time complexity during the online linking phase, effectively reducing the overall attack time complexity in both classical and quantum scenarios. Specifically, we can achieve more rounds in the classical setting and reduce the time complexity for the same round in the quantum setting.

In this paper, we extend the applicability of differential meet- in-the-middle attacks, proposed at Crypto 2023, to truncated differen- tials, and in addition, we introduce three new ideas to improve this type of attack: we show how to add longer structures than the original pa- per, we show how to improve the key recovery steps by introducing some probability in them, and we combine this type of attacks with the state- test technique, that was introduced in the context of impossible differ- ential attacks. Furthermore, we have developed a MILP-based tool to automate the search for a truncated differential-MITM attack with op- timized overall complexity, incorporating some of the proposed improve- ments. Thanks to this, we can build the best known attacks on the cipher CRAFT, reaching 23 rounds against 21 previously; we provide a new at- tack on 23-round SKINNY-64-192, and we improve the best attacks on SKINNY-128-384.

The Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) is looking for two postdoctoral researchers in post-quantum cryptography under Prof. Zhenfeng Zhang's team. The roles involve designing, analyzing, and implementing post-quantum cryptographic algorithms and protocols.

Candidates should have a Ph.D. in a related field and proven expertise in areas like lattice-based, multivariable polynomial-based, hash-based, code-based, or isogeny-based cryptography. A strong publication record and the ability to work collaboratively are essential. Excellent programming skills and knowledge of provable security theories are preferred.

Responsibilities include conducting high-level research, publishing findings, collaborating with team members, and participating in academic and industry events. The positions offer an annual pre-tax salary of 500,000 to 700,000 CNY (approx. 80,000 to 100,000 USD) and are based in Beijing. English proficiency is required; Chinese is not.

Applicants should send a CV with publications, a research statement, and at least two recommendation letters. Apply by July 30, 2024, for full consideration. This opportunity allows you to contribute to the advancement of cryptography at a leading Chinese research institution.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Dr. Long Chen (Email:chenlong@iscas.ac.cn)

More information: https://people.ucas.ac.cn/~zfzhang

We are looking for a self-motivated post-doc in Homomorphic Encryption supported under ARC Discovery project. The project is planned to start in July 2024 and for three years. The candidate is required to have a PhD qualification in relevant research fields in cryptography, mathematics or related fields. Please send your updated CV and related documents to the contact below.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Steven Duong

In view of its ongoing development, the CRYPTO group of the University of Versailles St-Quentin-en-Yvelines (France) invites applications for the following full-time position.

A tenured Professor faculty position (“Professeur des universités”) is open to highly qualified candidates who are committed to a career in research and teaching. Preference will be given to candidates with very strong research achievements in one or several of the areas related to the general fields of cryptology and information security.

Responsibilities include research leadership and dissemination, supervision of doctoral students, development of national or international research projects, and strong commitment to teaching at undergraduate or graduate level.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Except for candidates who are currently “Maître de conférences” in France and hold an HDR diploma (“Habilitation à diriger des recherches”), a “Qualification aux fonctions de professeur des universités” certificate from the french “Conseil National des Universités” is usually required to apply. However candidates who already hold a tenured professor (or equivalent) position may in some cases be exempted from this certificate.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Louis Goubin, Full Professor, head of the "Cryptology and Information Security" group

e-mail: louis.goubin (at) uvsq.fr

More information: https://www.galaxie.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/ensup/ListesPostesPublies/ANTEE/2024_1/0781944P/FOPC_0781944P_4338.pdf

The Cryptography and Privacy Engineering Group (ENCRYPTO) @CS Department @Technical University of Darmstadt offers a fully funded position as Doctoral Researcher (Research Assistant/PhD Student) in Cryptography and Privacy Engineering to be filled as soon as possible and initially for 3 years with the possibility of extension.

Job description:

You'll work in the collaborative research center CROSSING funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). In our project E4 Compiler for Privacy-Preserving Protocols, we build compilers to automatically generate optimized MPC protocols for privacy-preserving applications. See https://encrypto.de/CROSSING for details. As PhD@ENCRYPTO, you primarily focus on your research aiming to publish&present the results at top venues.

We offer:

We demonstrate that privacy is efficiently protectable in real-world applications via cryptographic protocols. Our open and international working environment facilitates excellent research in a sociable team. TU Darmstadt is a top research university for IT security, cryptography and CS in Europe. Darmstadt is a very international, livable and well-connected city in the Rhine-Main area around Frankfurt.

Your profile:

• Completed Master's degree (or equivalent) at a top university with excellent grades in IT security, computer science, or a similar area.
• Extensive knowledge in applied cryptography/IT security and very good software development skills. Knowledge in cryptographic protocols (ideally MPC) is a plus.
• Experience and interest to engage in teaching.
• Self-motivated, reliable, creative, can work independently, and striving to do excellent research.
• Our working language is English: Able to discuss/write/present scientific results in English. German is beneficial but not required.

Application deadline:Apr 8, 2024. Later applications are considered.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Thomas Schneider (application@encrypto.cs.tu-darmstadt.de)

More information: https://encrypto.de/2024-CROSSING

We are looking for a strong candidate that wants to pursue a PhD on privacy-preserving machine learning at Monash University (a world top 50 university) in the vibrant city of Melbourne, Australia (frequently ranked among the top 10 cities to live in the world).

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Rafael Dowsley (rafael.dowsley@monash.edu)