IACR News
Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:
05 July 2024
University of Wollongong, Australia
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Prof Willy Susilo
More information: https://www.uow.edu.au/about/jobs/jobs-available/#en/sites/CX_1/job/4604/?utm_medium=jobshare
NXP
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Kerstin Krauss
More information: https://nxp.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/careers/job/Gratkorn/Senior-Web-Service-Java-Software-Engineer-for-Trust-Provisioning--m-f-d-_R-10053960-1
TU Wien
At the Institute of Logic and Computation, in the Research Unit of Security and Privacy (in the upcoming Research Unit Privacy Enhanced Technologies) at TU Wien is offering two 40hours/week positions as university assistant (prae-doc) limited to expected 4 years. Expected start: September 2024
Tasks:
- Research in the area of privacy enhancing technologies, cryptocurrencies, and (applied) cryptography
- Teaching tasks (exercises and exams), student guidance
- Teaching in German and English is expected
- Assistance with thesis supervision
- Scientific publishing (journal and conference papers, dissertation) - Participation in scientific events
- Assistance with organizational and administrative tasks
Your profile: - Completion of a master or diploma curriculum in one of these fields: computer Science, math, or smilar fields
- Knowledge of privacy-enhancing technologies, such as cryptography, differential privacy, and related areas.
- Very good skills in German and English communication and writing Interest in academic research and teaching
- Advanced problem solving skills and scientific curiosity
- Team player with very good communication skills
We offer: A highly visible and connected international research group A broad range of opportunities in a thriving research area Hybrid working style with home office option A range of attractive social benefits (see Fringe-Benefit Catalogue of TU Wien) Internal and external training opportunities, various career options Central location of workplace as well as good accessibility (U1/U4 Karlsplatz)
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Dominique Schröder dominique.schroeder@tuwien.ac.at
More information: https://jobs.tuwien.ac.at/Job/235902
Aalto University, Finland
We are looking for postdocs interested in working with us (Chris Brzuska and Russell W. F. Lai) on topics including but not limited to:
- Lattice-based cryptography, with special focus on the design, application, and analysis of non-standard lattice assumptions
- Succinct and/or zero-knowledge proof and argument systems
- Advanced (e.g. homomorphic, attribute-based, functional, laconic) encryption and (e.g. ring, group, threshold, blind) signature schemes
- Fine-grained cryptography (e.g. against bounded-space-time adversaries)
- Lower bounds and impossibility results
For questions about the topics, feel free to drop us an email to discuss.
For more details about the position, and for the instructions of how to apply, please refer to https://www.hiit.fi/ict-community-postdoctoral-researcher-positions/.
Closing date for applications:
Contact:
- For the position: Chris Brzuska, Russell W. F. Lai
- For the recruiting system: HIIT coordinator (see link above)
More information: https://www.hiit.fi/ict-community-postdoctoral-researcher-positions/
University of Surrey
Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, to start as soon as possible, to work on the EPSRC-funded project “PKC-Sec: Security Analysis of Classical and Post-Quantum Public Key Cryptography Assumptions”. Based within the Computer Science Research Centre, and the highly regarded Surrey Centre for Cyber Security (SCCS), the post-holder will be responsible for conducting research into three areas mentioned below, working alongside Dr Granger, and in collaboration with the official project partners, the Ethereum Foundation, PQShield and K.U. Leuven.
The aim of the project is to research and develop algorithms for solving computational problems that are foundational to the security of public key cryptography, both now and in the future. In particular, it will study:
- The discrete logarithm problem in finite fields of fixed characteristic, for which an efficient classical algorithm is potentially on the horizon;
- The security of the Legendre pseudo-random function, which is extremely well suited for multi-party computation and is used in the proof of custody construction within Ethereum, but is not so well-studied;
- The security of supersingular isogeny-based post-quantum cryptography, which although a relatively young field offers many very promising applications.
Due to their nature, any cryptographic assumptions based on mathematical constructions are potentially weaker than currently believed, and the project will deepen our understanding and assess the hardness of these natural and fundamental problems.
The successful applicant is expected to have a PhD (gained or near completion), or equivalent professional experience in computer science or a related subject in the technical areas relevant to the envisioned research.
For informal inquiries about the position, please contact Dr. Robert Granger.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: r.granger@surrey.ac.uk
More information: https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx?ref=021224-R
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Kostas Papagiannopoulos - k.papagiannopoulos@uva.nl
More information: https://vacatures.uva.nl/UvA/job/Security-and-Network-Engineering-Education-Technical-Coordinator/798272902/
IRIF, Université de Paris Cité; Paris, France
Required qualifications: The ideal candidate for the postdoc position will hold a PhD (or be close to completion) in cryptography and be an expert in any of the areas of interest.
Salary: €3080 to €4291 gross monthly salary depending on the experience of the candidate
Dates: The starting date is flexible, starting October 2024.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: algocomp-apply@irif.fr
More information: https://www.irif.fr/postes/postdoc
University of Edinburgh
The position will be part of our research group, Quantum Software Lab which currently consists of more than 40 members, including eight faculty (Prof Elham Kashefi, Prof Chris Heunen, Dr Petros Wallden, Dr Myrto Arapinis, Dr Raul Garcia-Patron, Dr Mina Doosti, Dr Oliver Brown, Dr Alexandru Cojocaru). For more information, please contact a.cojocaru@ed.ac.uk with a CV and a short (up to 1 page) statement of research interests. The PhD position will have the expected starting date 1st October 2024, but later starting dates are negotiable. Candidates should apply by the 15th of July 2024, but are encouraged to reach out as early as possible. For a more detailed description, please see below.
Candidate’s profile. Applicants are expected to have (or about to obtain) a Master’s degree or equivalent (e.g., a First Class Honours) in Computer Science, Physics, or Mathematics. Outstanding candidates with a Bachelor’s degree (without a Master’s) will also be considered. A strong background in the theory of quantum computation, quantum information theory, cryptography or closely related fields is highly desirable.
Studentship and eligibility. Full time PhD tuition fees for a student with a Home or Overseas fee status; A tax free stipend of £19,237 per year for 3.5 years;
Research Environment. The School of Informatics at University of Edinburgh is one of the largest in Europe and currently the top Informatics institute in UK for research power, with 40% of its research outputs considered world-leading (top grade). University of Edinburgh is constantly ranked among the world’s top universities (among the top 20 Universities in the world in computer science) and is a highly international environment with several centres of excellence.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: a.cojocaru@ed.ac.uk
Joseph Johnston
Xiaoyang Hou, Jian Liu, Jingyu Li, Jiawen Zhang, Kui Ren
In this paper, we propose $\mathsf{ROTL}$, a secure two-party protocol for LUT evaluations. Compared with FLUTE (the state-of-the-art LUT presented at Oakland '23), it achieves upto 11.6$\times$ speedup in terms of overall performance and 155$\times$ speedup in terms of online performance. Furthermore, $\mathsf{ROTL}$ can support arithmetic shares (which is required by secure LLM inference), whereas FLUTE can only support boolean shares. At the heart of $\mathsf{ROTL}$ is a novel protocol for secret-shared rotation, which allows two parties to generate additive shares of the rotated table without revealing the rotation offset. We believe this protocol is of independent interest. Based on $\mathsf{ROTL}$, we design a novel secure comparison protocol; compared with the state-of-the-art, it achieves a 2.4$\times$ bandwidth reduction in terms of online performance.
To support boolean shares, we further provide an optimization for FLUTE, by reducing its computational complexity from $O(l\cdot n^2)$ to $O(n\log n+l\cdot n)$ and shifting $O(n\log n)$ computation to the preprocessing phase. As a result, compared with FLUTE, it achieves upto 10.8$\times$ speedup in terms of overall performance and 962$\times$ speedup in terms of online performance.
Xinyao Li, Xiwen Ren, Ling Ning, Changhai Ou
Rostin Shokri, Charles Gouert, Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos
Charles Gouert, Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos
Charles Gouert, Dimitris Mouris, Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos
Rostin Shokri, Charles Gouert, Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos
Lars Folkerts, Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos
Felix Günther, Douglas Stebila, Shannon Veitch
We formalize the notion of obfuscated key exchange, capturing the requirement that a key exchange protocol's traffic "looks random" and that it resists active probing attacks, in addition to ensuring secure session keys and authentication. We show that the Tor network's obfs4 protocol satisfies this definition. We then show how to extend the obfs4 design to defend against stronger censorship attacks and present a quantum-safe obfuscated key exchange protocol. To instantiate our quantum-safe protocol using the ML-KEM (Kyber) standard, we present Kemeleon, a new mapping between ML-KEM public keys/ciphertexts and uniform byte strings.
Onur Gunlu
This work provides lower bounds on Wyner's common information (WCI), which is one of the two corner points of the coordination-randomness rate region characterizing the ultimate limits of randomized distributed function computation. The WCI corresponds to the case when there is no common randomness shared by the transmitter and receiver. Moreover, numerical methods are proposed to compute the other corner point for continuous-valued random variables, for which an unlimited amount of common randomness is available. Results for two problems of practical interest illustrate that leveraging common randomness can decrease the communication load as compared to the WCI corner point significantly. We also illustrate that semantic communication gains over lossless compression methods are achieved also without common randomness, motivating further research on limited common randomness scenarios.