International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We are proud to announce the winners of the 2024 IACR Test-of-Time Award for Crypto.

The IACR Test-of-Time Award honors papers published at the 3 IACR flagship conferences 15 years ago which have had a lasting impact on the field.

The Test-of-Time award for Crypto 2009 is awarded to the following two papers:

Dual-System Encryption, by Brent Waters.
For introducing the dual-system technique, breaking through the partitioning-reductions barrier of pairing-based cryptography and enabling new and improved pairing-based cryptosystems.

Reconstructing RSA Private Keys from Random Key Bits, by Nadia Heninger and Hovav Shacham.
For introducing the go-to tool for side channel attacks on CRT-RSA that played a pivotal role in helping secure the Internet.

For more information, see https://www.iacr.org/testoftime.

Congratulations to all winners!

Event date: 28 April to 1 May 2025

Event date: 17 March to 21 March 2025

At EUROCRYPT'20, Bao et al. have shown that three-round cascading of $\textsf{LRW1}$ construction, which they dubbed as $\textsf{TNT}$, is a strong tweakable pseudorandom permutation that provably achieves $2n/3$-bit security bound. Jha et al. showed a birthday bound distinguishing attack on $\textsf{TNT}$ and invalidated the proven security bound and proved a tight birthday bound security on the $\textsf{TNT}$ construction in EUROCRYPT'24. In a recent work, Datta et al. have shown that four round cascading of the $\textsf{LRW1}$ construction, which they dubbed as $\textsf{CLRW1}^4$ is a strong tweakable pseudorandom permutation that provably achieves $3n/4$-bit security. In this paper, we propose a variant of the $\textsf{TNT}$ construction, called $\textsf{b-TNT1}$, and proved its security up to $2^{3n/4}$ queries. However, unlike $\textsf{CLRW1}^4$, $\textsf{b-TNT1}$ requires three block cipher calls along with a field multiplication. Besides, we also propose another variant of the $\textsf{TNT}$ construction, called $\textsf{b-TNT2}$ and showed a similar security bound. Compared to $\textsf{b-TNT1}$, $\textsf{b-TNT2}$ requires four block cipher calls. Nevertheless, its execution of block cipher calls can be pipelined which makes it efficient over $\textsf{CLRW1}^4$. We have also experimentally verified that both $\textsf{b-TNT1}$ and $\textsf{b-TNT2}$ outperform $\textsf{CLRW1}^4$.

A crucial component of any zero-knowledge system is operations with finite fields. This, in turn, leads to the implementation of the fundamental operation: multiplying two big integers. In the realm of Bitcoin, this problem gets revisited, as Bitcoin utilizes its own stack-based and not Turing-complete scripting system called Bitcoin Script. Inspired by Elliptic Curve scalar multiplication, this paper introduces the $w$-windowed method for multiplying two numbers. We outperform state-of-the-art approaches, including BitVM’s implementation. Finally, we also show how the windowed method can lead to optimizations not only in big integer arithmetic solely but in more general arithmetic problems.

We show that the DAG-based consensus protocol Tusk [DKSS22] does not achieve liveness, at least under certain reasonable assumptions on the implementation that are consistent with its specification. In addition, we give a simple 2-round variation of Tusk with lower latency and strong liveness properties, but with suboptimal resilience. We also show that another 2-round protocol, GradedDAG [DZX+24], which has optimal resilience, also has liveness problems analogous to Tusk.

With the potential arrival of quantum computers, it is essential to build cryptosystems resistant to attackers with the computing power of a quantum computer. With Shor's algorithm, cryptosystems based on discrete logarithms and factorization become obsolete. Reason why NIST has launching two competitions in 2016 and 2023 to standardize post-quantum cryptosystems (such as KEM and signature ) based on problems supposed to resist attacks using quantum computers. EagleSign was prosed to NIT competition in Jun 2023 as an additional signature. An improvement called EagleSign-V2 was proposed in December 2023 but Tibouchi and Pells prove that these two variants don't hold the zero knowledge property. In this document we present the family of lattices based post-quantum signatures called EagleSignV3. They are secure and efficient successors of both EagleSign-V1 (NIST, June 2023) and EagleSign-V2 (NIST forum, December 2023). The public key of EagleSignV3 is based on a mix of MLE (Module Learning with Error) and MNTRU (module variant of the famous NTRU problem). The instantiations EagleSignV3 are new variants of the EagleSign signatures family posted to NIST competition in June 2023 as additional signatures. EagleSignV3 uses the rejection of Lyubashevsky-2012 to achieve the zero-knowledge property. The main difference between EagleSign and Dilithium is the public key. We have two instantiations based either on ring or on module. The sizes of the ring based variant of EagleSignV3 are close to those of Dilithium but the sizes of its module based instantiation is bigger than those of Dilithium. NB: The implementation of EagleSign-V1 is available on NIST website and those of EagleSign-V2 can be found on Github at https://github.com/EagleSignteam/EagleSign_v2 and in NIST forum as a comment on improvements on EagleSign in December 2023. The implementation of EagleSign-V3 can be deduced from those of EagleSignV2.

In this work, we continue the analysis of the binding properties of implicitly-rejecting key-encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) obtained via the Fujisaki-Okamoto (FO) transform. These binding properties, in earlier literature known under the term robustness, thwart attacks that can arise when using KEMs in larger protocols. Recently, Cremers et al. (ePrint'24) introduced a framework for binding notions, encompassing previously existing but also new ones. While implicitly-rejecting KEMs have been analyzed with respect to multiple of these notions, there are still several gaps. We complete the picture by providing positive and negative results for the remaining notions. Further, we show how to apply our results to the code-based KEMs BIKE and HQC, which are among the round-4 candidates in NISTs PQC standardization process. Through this, we close a second gap as our results finish the analysis of the binding notions for the NIST round-4 KEMs.

The virtualization of network functions is a promising technology, which can enable mobile network operators to provide more flexibility and better resilience for their infrastructure and services. Yet, virtualization comes with challenges, as 5G operators will require a means of verifying the state of the virtualized network components (e.g. Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) or managing hypervisors) in order to fulfill security and privacy commitments. One such means is the use of attestation protocols. In this paper, we focus on Collective Remote Attestation (cRA), which is used to attest the state of a group of devices. Although cRA has been extensively studied in the context of IoT, it has not been used yet in virtualized mobile networks, a different use-case, with constraints of its own.

In this paper, we propose the first protocol to efficiently and securely attest a group of Virtualized Network Functions which make up a VNF Forwarding Graph. Our protocol comes with strong and provable guarantees of: unforgeability of attestation, the linkability of attestations for related components, and the privacy of sensitive configuration details for the infrastructure provider. In particular, we are the first to formally define and analyze such properties for VNF-FG attestation. Finally, through our Proof-of-Concept implementation, we show that our construction is not only strongly secure, but also efficient.

Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is a cutting-edge cryptographic technique that enables computations on encrypted data to be mirrored on the original data. This has quickly attracted substantial interest from the research community due to its extensive practical applications, such as in cloud computing and privacy-preserving machine learning.

In addition to confidentiality, the importance of authenticity has emerged to ensure data integrity during transmission and evaluation. To address authenticity, various primitives have been developed including Homomorphic Authenticator (HA). Corresponding security notions have also been introduced by extending the existing notions to their homomorphic versions.

Despite these advancements, formalizing the security of HE and HA remains challenging due to the novelty of these primitives and complexity of application scenarios involving message evaluation. It is inclusive which definitions in this zoo of notions are insufficient or overly complex. Moreover, HE and HA are designed to be combined to construct a secure communication channel that ensures both confidentiality and authenticity. However, the security of such compositions is not always clear when game-based notions are used to formalize security.

To bridge this gap, we conduct a constructive analysis through the lens of com- posable security. This method enables us to examine the security properties of each primitive in isolation and to more effectively evaluate their security when integrated into a larger system. We introduce the concepts of a confidential channel and an au- thenticated channel to specify the security requirements for HE and HA, respectively. We make a comparison with existing game-based notions to determine whether they adequately capture the intended security objectives.

We then analyze whether the composition of HE and HA constructs a Homomorphic Authenticated Encryption (HAE) that provides both confidentiality and authenticity in presence of message evaluation. Specifically, we examine a serial composition of HE and HA, corresponding to Encrypt-then-MAC (EtM) composition for constructing classical AE.

The impossible boomerang (IB) attack was first introduced by Lu in his doctoral thesis and subsequently published at DCC in 2011. The IB attack is a variant of the impossible differential (ID) attack by incorporating the idea of the boomerang attack. In this paper, we revisit the IB attack, and introduce the incompatibility of two characteristics in boomerang to the construction of an IB distinguisher. With our methodology, all the constructions of IB distinguisher are represented in a unified manner. Moreover, we show that the related-(twea)key IB distinguishers possess more freedom than the ones of ID so that it can cover more rounds. We also propose a new tool based on Mixed-Integer Quadratically-Constrained Programming (MIQCP) to search for IB attacks. To illustrate the power of the IB attack, we mount attacks against three tweakable block ciphers: Deoxys-BC, Joltik-BC and SKINNY. For Deoxys-BC, we propose a related-tweakey IB attack on 14-round Deoxys-BC-384, which improves the best previous related-tweakey ID attack by 2 rounds, and we improve the data complexity of the best previous related-tweakey ID attack on 10-round Deoxys-BC-256. For Joltik-BC, we propose the best attacks against 10-round Joltik-BC-128 and 14-round Joltik-BC-192 with related-tweakey IB attack. For SKINNY-n-3n, we propose a 27-round related-tweakey IB attack, which improves both the time and the memory complexities of the best previous ID attack. We also propose the first related-tweakey IB attack on 28 round SKINNY-n-3n, which improves the previous best ID attack by one round.

Summary

As a Cryptographic Engineer in Applied Cryptography, you will play a vital role in developing and implementing cryptographic solutions. You'll work alongside a team of talented individuals, contributing to various projects ranging from prototyping new cryptographic products to optimizing existing ones. You will collaborate closely with software architects, product managers, and other team members to successfully deliver high-quality cryptographic solutions that meet market demands.

You will need to have a strong foundation in engineering principles and a keen interest in cryptography. This role offers an exciting opportunity to work on cutting-edge technologies while continuously learning and growing in applied cryptography.

Duties

As a Cryptographic Engineer, you'll play a pivotal role in implementing Zero-Knowledge (ZK) circuits tailored for integration within the Midnight chain. Your focus will involve leveraging recursive proof technologies, particularly those based on Halo2, to create proofs regarding the Midnight state. These proofs are designed to interface with other ecosystems, such as Cardano, providing a secure and efficient means to interact and exchange information across platforms. Your duties will include:

Working with teams across time zones

Working independently on software development tasks

Being proactive and requiring minimal supervision or mentoring to complete tasks

Contribute to the development and delivery of cryptographic products

Assist in prototyping new cryptographic solutions

Implement cryptographic primitives according to established specifications

Collaborate with team members to review cryptographic protocols and proposed primitives

Document code and APIs clearly and comprehensively

Adhere to software engineering best practices during the development process

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Marios Nicolaides

More information: https://apply.workable.com/io-global/j/E68F9E4337/

Lattice cryptography schemes based on the learning with errors (LWE) hardness assumption have been standardized by NIST for use as post-quantum cryptosystems, and by HomomorphicEncryption.org for encrypted compute on sensitive data. Thus, understanding their concrete security is critical. Most work on LWE security focuses on theoretical estimates of attack performance, which is important but may overlook attack nuances arising in real-world implementations. The sole existing concrete benchmarking effort, the Darmstadt Lattice Challenge, does not include benchmarks relevant to the standardized LWE parameter choices - such as small secret and small error distributions, and Ring-LWE (RLWE) and Module-LWE (MLWE) variants. To improve our understanding of concrete LWE security, we provide the first benchmarks for LWE secret recovery on standardized parameters, for small and low-weight (sparse) secrets. We evaluate four LWE attacks in these settings to serve as a baseline: the Search-LWE attacks uSVP, SALSA, and Coo & Cruel, and the Decision-LWE attack: Dual Hybrid Meet-in-the-Middle (MitM). We extend the SALSA and Cool & Cruel attacks in significant ways, and implement and scale up MitM attacks for the first time. For example, we recover hamming weight $9-11$ binomial secrets for KYBER ($\kappa=2$) parameters in $28-36$ hours with SALSA and Cool\&Cruel, while we find that MitM can solve Decision-LWE instances for hamming weights up to $4$ in under an hour for Kyber parameters, while uSVP attacks do not recover any secrets after running for more than $1100$ hours. We also compare concrete performance against theoretical estimates. Finally, we open source the code to enable future research.

Generative Pre-Trained Transformer models have been shown to be surprisingly effective at a variety of natural language processing tasks -- including generating computer code. However, in general GPT models have been shown to not be incredibly effective at handling specific computational tasks (such as evaluating mathematical functions). In this study, we evaluate the effectiveness of open source GPT models, with no fine-tuning, and with context introduced by the langchain and localGPT Large Language Model (LLM) framework, for the task of automatic identification of the presence of vulnerable code syntax (specifically targeting C and C++ source code). This task is evaluated on a selection of $36$ source code examples from the NIST SARD dataset, which are specifically curated to not contain natural English that indicates the presence, or lack thereof, of a particular vulnerability (including the removal of all source code comments). The NIST SARD source code dataset contains identified vulnerable lines of source code that are examples of one out of the $839$ distinct Common Weakness Enumerations (CWE), allowing for exact quantification of the GPT output classification error rate. A total of $5$ GPT models are evaluated, using $10$ different inference temperatures and $100$ repetitions at each setting, resulting in $5,000$ GPT queries per vulnerable source code analyzed. Ultimately, we find that the open source GPT models that we evaluated are not suitable for fully automated vulnerability scanning because the false positive and false negative rates are too high to likely be useful in practice. However, we do find that the GPT models perform surprisingly well at automated vulnerability detection for some of the test cases, in particular surpassing random sampling (for some GPT models and inference temperatures), and being able to identify the exact lines of code that are vulnerable albeit at a low success rate. The best performing GPT model result found was Llama-2-70b-chat-hf with inference temperature of $0.1$ applied to NIST SARD test case 149165 (which is an example of a buffer overflow vulnerability), which had a binary classification recall score of $1.0$ and a precision of $1.0$ for correctly and uniquely identifying the vulnerable line of code and the correct CWE number. Additionally, the GPT models are able to, with a rate quantifiably better than random sampling, identify the specific line of source that contains the identified CWE for many of the NIST SARD test cases.

Anonymous Broadcast Channels (ABCs) allow a group of clients to announce messages without revealing the exact author. Modern ABCs operate in a client-server model, where anonymity depends on some threshold (e.g., 1 of 2) of servers being honest. ABCs are an important application in their own right, e.g., for activism and whistleblowing. Recent work on ABCs (Riposte, Blinder) has focused on minimizing the bandwidth cost to clients and servers when supporting large broadcast channels for such applications. But, particularly for low bandwidth settings, they impose large costs on servers, make cover traffic costly, and make volunteer operators unlikely.

In this paper, we describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of ZIPNet, an anonymous broadcast channel that 1) scales to hundreds of anytrust servers by minimizing the computational costs of each server, 2) substantially reduces the servers’ bandwidth costs by outsourcing the aggregation of client messages to untrusted (for privacy) infrastructure, and 3) supports cover traffic that is both cheap for clients to produce and for servers to handle.

The Noise specification describes how to systematically construct a large family of Diffie-Hellman based key exchange protocols, including the secure transports used by WhatsApp, Lightning, and WireGuard. As the specification only makes informal security claims, earlier work has explored which formal security properties may be enjoyed by protocols in the Noise framework, yet many important questions remain open.

In this work we provide the most comprehensive, systematic analysis of the Noise framework to date. We start from first principles and, using an automated analysis tool, compute the strongest threat model under which a protocol is secure, thus enabling formal comparison between protocols. Our results allow us to objectively and automatically associate each informal security level presented in the Noise specification with a formal security claim.

We also provide a fine-grained separation of Noise protocols that were previously described as offering similar security properties, revealing a subclass for which alternative Noise protocols exist that offer strictly better security guarantees. Our analysis also uncovers missing assumptions in the Noise specification and some surprising consequences, e.g. in some situations higher security levels yield strictly worse security.

Event date: 5 May to 8 May 2025

Non-Interactive Timed Commitment schemes (NITC) allow to open any commitment after a specified delay $t_{\mathrm{fd}}$ . This is useful for sealed bid auctions and as primitive for more complex protocols. We present the first NITC without repeated squaring or theoretical black box algorithms like NIZK proofs or one-way functions. It has fast verification, almost arbitrary delay and satisfies IND-CCA hiding and perfect binding. Additionally, it needs no trusted setup. Our protocol is based on isogenies between supersingular elliptic curves making it presumably quantum secure, and all algorithms have been implemented as part of SQISign or other well-known isogeny-based cryptosystems.

Secure sketches are designed to facilitate the recovery of originally enrolled data from inputs that may vary slightly over time. This capability is important in applications where data consistency cannot be guaranteed due to natural variations, such as in biometric systems and hardware security. Traditionally, secure sketches are constructed using error-correcting codes to handle these variations effectively. Additionally, principles of information theory ensure the security of these sketches by managing the trade-off between data recoverability and confidentiality. In this paper, we show how to construct a new family of secure sketches generically from groups. The notion of groups with unique factorization property is first introduced, which is of independent interest and serves as a building block for our secure sketch construction. Next, an in-depth study of the underlying mathematical structures is provided, and some computational and decisional hardness assumptions are defined. As a result, it is argued that our secure sketches are efficient; can handle a linear fraction of errors with respect to the norm 1 distance; and that they are reusable and irreversible. To our knowledge, such generic group-based secure sketch construction is the first of its kind, and it offers a viable alternative to the currently known secure sketches.

For more than two decades, pairings have been a fundamental tool for designing elegant cryptosystems, varying from digital signature schemes to more complex privacy-preserving constructions. However, the advancement of quantum computing threatens to undermine public-key cryptography. Concretely, it is widely accepted that a future large-scale quantum computer would be capable to break any public-key cryptosystem used today, rendering today's public-key cryptography obsolete and mandating the transition to quantum-safe cryptographic solutions. This necessity is enforced by numerous recognized government bodies around the world, including NIST which initiated the first open competition in standardizing post-quantum (PQ) cryptographic schemes, focusing primarily on digital signatures and key encapsulation/public-key encryption schemes. Despite the current efforts in standardizing PQ primitives, the landscape of complex, privacy-preserving cryptographic protocols, e.g., zkSNARKs/zkSTARKs, is at an early stage. Existing solutions suffer from various disadvantages in terms of efficiency and compactness and in addition, they need to undergo the required scrutiny to gain the necessary trust in the academic and industrial domains. Therefore, it is believed that the migration to purely quantum-safe cryptography would require an intermediate step where current classically secure protocols and quantum-safe solutions will co-exist. This is enforced by the report of the Commercial National Security Algorithm Suite version 2.0, mandating transition to quantum-safe cryptographic algorithms by 2033 and suggesting to incorporate ECC at 192-bit security in the meantime. To this end, the present paper aims at providing a comprehensive study on pairings at 192-bit security level. We start with an exhaustive review in the literature to search for all possible recommendations of such pairing constructions, from which we extract the most promising candidates in terms of efficiency and security, with respect to the advanced Special TNFS attacks. Our analysis is focused, not only on the pairing computation itself, but on additional operations that are relevant in pairing-based applications, such as hashing to pairing groups, cofactor clearing and subgroup membership testing. We implement all functionalities of the most promising candidates within the RELIC cryptographic toolkit in order to identify the most efficient pairing implementation at 192-bit security and provide extensive experimental results.