International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Event date: 14 July to 16 July 2025
Submission deadline: 6 November 2024
Notification: 22 January 2025

Event date: 14 January to 16 January 2025
Submission deadline: 20 September 2024
Notification: 1 October 2024

Our chair performs research and teaching in the area of IT Security with a strong focus on Network Security and Online Privacy. More information about us can be found at https://www.b-tu.de/en/fg-it-sicherheit.

Tasks:
• Active research in the area of intrusion detection systems (IDS) for critical infrastructures, secure cyber-physical systems, and artificial intelligence / machine learning for traffic analysis
• Implementation and evaluation of new algorithms and methods
• Cooperation and knowledge transfer with industrial partners
• Publication of scientific results
• Assistance with teaching

Requirements:
• Master’s degree (or equivalent) and PhD degree (only for PostDocs) in Computer Science or related disciplines
• Strong interest in IT security and/or networking and distributed systems
• Knowledge of at least one programming language (C++, Java, etc.) and one scripting language (Perl, Python, etc.) or strong willingness to quickly learn new programming languages
• Linux/Unix skills
• Knowledge of data mining, machine learning, statistics and result visualization concepts is of advantage
• Excellent working knowledge of English; German is of advantage
• Excellent communication skills

Applications containing the following documents:
• A detailed Curriculum Vitae
• Transcript of records from your Master studies
• An electronic version of your Master thesis, if possible should be sent in a single PDF file as soon as possible, but not later than 04.10.2024 at itsec-jobs.informatik@lists.b-tu.de. Applications sent to email addresses other than that will be automatically discarded

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Andriy Panchenko,
Email: itsec-jobs.informatik@lists.b-tu.de

More information: https://www.informatik.tu-cottbus.de/~andriy/phd-ad-btu_en.pdf

The CryptoTeam at Chalmers University of Technology is looking for a PhD student (5 years, full position) to join the team.

This position offers an exciting opportunity to delve into the rapidly evolving field of Transparency Protocols and to make impactful contributions towards new designs, security proofs, and the uptake of this technology. You will join the CryptoTeam under the supervision of Assistant Professor Elena Pagnin and your base will be Chalmers (Gothenburg, Sweden). Chalmers is a renown University in Technical subjects, and provides a dynamic, highly international work environment within a world-leading research group with expertise in various aspects of cryptography, security, formal methods, and their applications.

For more information visit the official ad https://www.chalmers.se/en/about-chalmers/work-with-us/vacancies/?rmpage=job&rmjob=13180&rmlang=UK . Note that only applications received via the Chalmers Vacancies portal will be considered. Application deadline: October 4, 2024.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Elena Pagnin

More information: https://www.chalmers.se/en/about-chalmers/work-with-us/vacancies/?rmpage=job&rmjob=13180&rmlang=UK

The Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science (AMSS) of Chinese Academy of Sciences invites applications for tenured and tenure-track faculty positions at all ranks and in the areas of information theory, theoretical computer science and cryptography, coding and communication, etc. Remuneration package will be driven by market competitiveness and individual performance. Excellent fringe benefits include annual research funds, settle-down allowance and low-priced tentative apartments near office for 5 years. Successful applicants are expected to conduct full-time research in AMSS. Teaching is appreciated, but not an obligation.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Dr. Zhifang Zhang, email: zfz@amss.ac.cn; Dr. Yanbin Pan, email: panyanbin@amss.ac.cn; Dr. Xiutao Feng, email: fengxt@amss.ac.cn

More information: https://www.mathjobs.org/jobs/list/23139

Fully funded Ph.D. and postdoc positions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem are available at the Cryptography Group at the School of Computer Science and Engineering. Email applications should include a CV and references (if available).

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Ilan Komargodski (ilank at cs dot huji dot ac dot il)

Do you like solving challenges in cyber security? Do you want to become part of a growing team of cybersecurity researchers at the University of Amsterdam whose research contributes to securing our digital world? The Theory of Computer Science (TCS) and Complex Cyber Infrastructure (CCI) research groups of the Informatics Institute are looking for a new assistant professor in cyber security. You will be able to hire a PhD student as part of the startup-package.

You will conduct research in the “Challenges in Cyber Security” project, one of the few projects receiving funding in the prestigious NWO Gravitation program. In cooperation with researchers from TU Eindhoven, Radboud University Nijmegen, VU Amsterdam, and CWI, you will work on the grand challenges of cybersecurity in areas such as cryptography, software security, or physical security. Besides cutting-edge research, you will also contribute to education – for example, in the top-rated Security and Network Engineering MSc program – and other activities, including acquisition and management of funded research projects, supervision of PhD students, and supervision of BSc/MSc graduation projects.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Christian Schaffner

More information: https://vacatures.uva.nl/UvA/job/Assistant-Professor-in-Cyber-Security/802718502/

Side-channel analysis (SCA) compromises the security of cryptographic devices by exploiting various side-channel leakages such as power consumption, electromagnetic (EM) emanations, or timing variations, posing a practical threat to the security and privacy of modern digital systems. In power or EM SCA, statistical or machine learning methods are employed to extract secret information from power/EM traces. In many practical scenarios, raw power/EM traces can span hundreds of thousands of features, with relevant leakages occurring over only a few small segments. Consequently, existing SCAs often select a small number of features before launching the attack, making their success highly dependent on the feasibility of feature selection. However, feature selection may not always be possible, such as in the presence of countermeasures like masking or jitters.

Several recent works have employed deep learning (DL) methods to conduct SCA on long raw traces, thereby reducing dependence on feature selection steps. However, these methods often perform poorly against various jitter-based countermeasures. While some of these methods have shown high robustness to jitter-based countermeasures on relatively shorter traces, we demonstrate in this work that their performance deteriorates as trace lengths increase. Based on these observations, we develop a hierarchical DL model for SCA on long traces that is robust against various countermeasures. The proposed model, HierNet, extracts information from long traces using a two-level information assimilation process. At the base level, a DL model with shift-invariance is employed to extract information from smaller trace segments. Subsequently, a top-level DL model integrates the outputs of the base model to generate the final output. The proposed model has been experimentally evaluated against various combinations of masking, random delay, and clock jitter countermeasures using traces with lengths exceeding $200K$ features. The results have been compared with three existing SCA benchmark models. They demonstrate HierNet's superiority in several scenarios, such as on long traces, against clock jitter countermeasures, and low training data scenarios. In particular, while other models fail to reach the guessing entropy $1$ using as many as $5K$ traces, HierNet achieves the same with fewer than or close to $10$ traces.

With the increasing spread of fake videos for misinformation, proving the provenance of an edited video (without revealing the original one) becomes critical. To this end, we introduce Eva, the first cryptographic protocol for authenticating lossy-encoded videos. Compared to previous cryptographic methods for image authentication, Eva supports significantly larger amounts of data that undergo complex transformations during encoding. We achieve this by decomposing repetitive and manageable components from video codecs, which can then be handled using Incrementally Verifiable Computation (IVC). By providing a formal definition and security model for proofs of video authenticity, we demonstrate the security of Eva under well-established cryptographic assumptions.

To make Eva efficient, we construct an IVC based on folding schemes that incorporate lookup arguments, resulting in a linear-time prover whose proofs can be compressed to a constant size. We further improve the performance of Eva through various optimizations, including tailored circuit design and GPU acceleration. The evaluation of our implementation shows that Eva is practical: for a $1$-minute HD ($1280 \times 720$) video encoded in H.264 at $30$ frames per second, Eva generates a proof in about $2.5$ hours on consumer-grade hardware at a speed of $5.5$ μs per pixel, surpassing previous cryptographic image authentication schemes that support arbitrary editing operations by more than an order of magnitude.

Many of the currently best actively secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) protocols like SPDZ (Damgård et al., CRYPTO 2012) and improvements thereof use correlated randomness to speed up the time-critical online phase. Although many of these protocols still rely on classical Beaver triples, recent results show that more complex correlations like matrix or convolution triples lead to more efficient evaluations of the corresponding operations, i.e. matrix multiplications or tensor convolutions. In this paper, we address the evaluation of multivariate polynomials with a new form of randomness: polytuples. We use the polytuples to construct a new family of randomized encodings which then allow us to evaluate the given multivariate polynomial. Our approach can be fine-tuned in various ways to the constraints of applications at hand, in terms of round complexity, bandwidth, and tuple size. We show that for many real-world setups, a polytuples-based online phase outperforms state-of-the-art protocols based on Beaver triples.

Sigma protocols are elegant cryptographic proofs that have become a cornerstone of modern cryptography. A notable example is Schnorr's protocol, a zero-knowledge proof-of-knowledge of a discrete logarithm. Despite extensive research, the security of Schnorr's protocol in the standard model is not fully understood.

In this paper we study Kilian's protocol, an influential public-coin interactive protocol that, while not a sigma protocol, shares striking similarities with sigma protocols. The first example of a succinct argument, Kilian's protocol is proved secure via rewinding, the same idea used to prove sigma protocols secure. In this paper we show how, similar to Schnorr's protocol, a precise understanding of the security of Kilian's protocol remains elusive. We contribute new insights via upper bounds and lower bounds. - Upper bounds. We establish the tightest known bounds on the security of Kilian's protocol in the standard model, via strict-time reductions and via expected-time reductions. Prior analyses are strict-time reductions that incur large overheads or assume restrictive properties of the PCP underlying Kilian's protocol. - Lower bounds. We prove that significantly improving on the bounds that we establish for Kilian's protocol would imply improving the security analysis of Schnorr's protocol beyond the current state-of-the-art (an open problem). This partly explains the difficulties in obtaining tight bounds for Kilian's protocol.

Secure Multi-party Computation (MPC) provides a promising solution for privacy-preserving multi-source data analytics. However, existing MPC-based collaborative analytics systems (MCASs) have unsatisfying performance for scenarios with dynamic databases. Naively running an MCAS on a dynamic database would lead to significant redundant costs and raise performance concerns, due to the substantial duplicate contents between the pre-updating and post-updating databases.

In this paper, we propose $Shortcut$, a framework that can work with MCASs to enable efficient queries on dynamic databases that support data insertion, deletion, and update. The core idea of $Shortcut$ is to materialize previous query results and directly update them via our query result update (QRU) protocol to obtain current query results. We customize several efficient QRU protocols for common SQL operators, including Order-by-Limit, Group-by-Aggregate, Distinct, Join, Select, and Global Aggregate. These protocols are composable to implement a wide range of query functions. In particular, we propose two constant-round protocols to support data insertion and deletion. These protocols can serve as important building blocks of other protocols and are of independent interest. They address the problem of securely inserting/deleting a row into/from an ordered table while keeping the order. Our experiments show that $Shortcut$ outperforms naive MCASs for minor updates arriving in time, which captures the need of many realistic applications (e.g., insurance services, account data management). For example, for a single query after an insertion, $Shortcut$ achieves up to $186.8 \times$ improvement over those naive MCASs without our QRU protocols on a dynamic database with $2^{16} \sim 2^{20}$ rows, which is common in real-life applications.

We consider the multi-user security under the adaptive corruptions and key leakages ($\rm{MU^{c\&l}}$ security) for lattice-based signatures. Although there exists an $\rm{MU^{c\&l}}$ secure signature based on a number-theoretic assumption, or a leakage-resilient lattice-based signature in the single-user setting, $\rm{MU^{c\&l}}$ secure lattice-based signature is not known.

We examine the existing lattice-based signature schemes from the viewpoint of $\rm{MU^{c\&l}}$ security, and find that the security of the Lyubashevsky's signature, which is proven to have the ordinary single-user security only, can be extended to the multi-user security even if we take the adaptive corruptions and the key leakages into account.

Our security proof in the multi-user setting makes use of the feature of the SIS problem so that a SIS instance is set to the public parameter and a reduction algorithm can set a public key with a secret key in order to answer a corruption query. We also show that the entropy of the secret key is kept under the bounded leakage with a high probability and then the leakage resilience of signature holds.

Studies of vector oblivious linear evaluation (VOLE)-based zero-knowledge (ZK) protocols flourish in recent years. Such ZK protocols feature optimal prover computation and a flexibility for handling arithmetic circuits over arbitrary fields. However, most of them have linear communication, which constitutes a bottleneck for handling large statements in a slow network. The pioneer work AntMan (CCS'22), achieved sublinear communication for the first time within VOLE-based ZK, but lost the advantage of fast proving. In this work, we propose two new VOLE-based ZK constructions that achieve sublinear communication and linear computation, simultaneously. Let $\mathcal{C}$ be a circuit with size $S$, input size $n$, and depth $d$. In particular, our first ZK, specialized for layered circuits, has communication $O(n+d\log{S})$, while our second ZK can be used to prove general circuits and has communication $O(n+d\log{S}+d^2)$.

Our results are obtained by introducing the powerful sum-check techniques from the mature line of works on interactive proofs into the context of VOLE-based ZK for the first time. Reminiscent of the non-interactive line-point zero-knowledge proof system (ITC'21), we introduce an interactive line-point zero-knowledge (ILPZK) proof system, which closely connects with VOLE-based ZK protocols. In addition, our works also enrich the studies of ZK based on interactive proofs, with new interesting features (e.g., having information-theoretic UC-security, naturally supporting any field) achieved.

Garbled circuits are a powerful and important cryptographic primitive, introduced by Yao [FOCS 1986] for secure two-party computation. Beaver, Micali and Rogaway (BMR) [STOCS 1990] extended the garbled circuit technique to construct the first constant-round secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocol. In the BMR protocol, the garbled circuit size grows linearly and the online computation time grows quadratically with the number of parties. Previous solutions to avoid this relied on key-homomorphic PRFs, incurring a large garbled circuit size and slow online computation time. We present MYao, a new multiparty protocol for achieving a ``Yao'' garbled circuit, i.e., the garbled circuit size and online computation time are independent of the number of parties. The key innovation is that the parties collaboratively compute the PRF in MPC, which was previously believed to be inefficient. In this paper, we challenge this long-standing assumption by basing the garbled circuit construction on ``MPC-friendly'' PRFs. One of the highlights of our new technique is that we are able to achieve, for the first time, full row-reduction in multiparty garbled circuits. To achieve this optimization without increasing the number of rounds, we utilize free-XOR and half gates, presenting a new technique for choosing the keys, based on a naturally occurring relation between the 2 keys of the 2 half-gates. MYao reduces the garbled circuit size by more than 90%, the total communication by more than 75%, and the online computation time by more than 10%, compared to all known solutions based on key-homomorphic PRFs, thus substantially improving the overall efficiency in both the offline and the online phases. Furthermore, MYao significantly improves over semi-honest BMR in online phase efficiency when the number of parties exceeds 80.

We propose an efficient non-interactive privacy-preserving Transformer inference architecture called Powerformer. Since softmax is a non-algebraic operation, previous studies have attempted to modify it to be HE-friendly, but these methods have encountered issues with accuracy degradation or prolonged execution times due to the use of multiple bootstrappings. We propose replacing softmax with a new ReLU-based function called the \textit{Batch Rectifier-Power max} (BRPmax) function without any unstable approximation methods, which outperforms even original BERT performance within BERT-Large model while requiring fewer levels, allowing it to operate with only a single bootstrapping. We also present a matrix multiplication algorithms specialized for attention block that reduce the number of key-switchings by 35% to 91% compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. We design clear end-to-end HE-based implementation for private Transformer model, and our implementation of Powerformer on the BERT-tiny model using RNS-CKKS takes 503 seconds on a single-threaded CPU, and to the best of our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end non-interactive Transformer implementation using HE.

Federated Learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a machine learning model while keeping their data private, eliminating the need for data sharing. Two common approaches to secure aggregation (SA) in FL are the single-aggregator and multiple-aggregator models. Existing multiple-aggregator protocols such as Prio (NSDI 2017), Prio+ (SCN 2022), Elsa (S\&P 2023) either offer robustness only in the presence of semi-honest servers or provide security without robustness and are limited to two aggregators. We introduce Mario, the first multi-aggregator SA protocol that is both secure in a malicious setting and provides robustness. Similar to prior work of Prio and Prio+, Mario provides secure aggregation in a setup of $n$ servers and $m$ clients. Unlike previous work, Mario removes the assumption of semi-honest servers, and provides a complete protocol with robustness against less than $n/2$ malicious servers, defense with input validation of upto $m-2$ corrupted clients, and dropout of any number of clients. Our implementation shows that Mario is $3.40\times$ and $283.4\times$ faster than Elsa and Prio+, respecitively.

In the Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) of a disjunctive statement, $\mathcal{P}$ and $\mathcal{V}$ agree on $B$ fan-in $2$ circuits $\mathcal{C}_0, \ldots, \mathcal{C}_{B-1}$ over a field $\mathbb{F}$; each circuit has $n_{\mathit{in}}$ inputs, $n_\times$ multiplications, and one output. $\mathcal{P}$'s goal is to demonstrate the knowledge of a witness $(\mathit{id} \in [B]$, $\boldsymbol{w} \in \mathbb{F}^{n_{\mathit{in}}})$, s.t. $\mathcal{C}_{\mathit{id}}(\boldsymbol{w}) = 0$ where neither $\boldsymbol{w}$ nor $\mathit{id}$ is revealed. Disjunctive statements are effective, for example, in implementing ZKP based on sequential execution of CPU steps.

This paper studies ZKP (of knowledge) protocols over disjunctive statements based on Vector OLE. Denoting by $\lambda$ the statistical security parameter and let $\rho \overset{\Delta}{=} \max\{\log |\mathbb{F}|, \lambda\}$, the previous state-of-the-art protocol $\mathsf{Robin}$ (Yang et al. CCS'23) required $(n_{\mathit{in}}+3n_\times)\log \left|\mathbb{F}\right| + \mathcal{O}(\rho B)$ bits of communication with $ \mathcal{O}(1)$ rounds, and $\mathsf{Mac'n'Cheese}$ (Baum et al. CRYPTO'21) required $(n_{\mathit{in}}+n_\times)\log \left|\mathbb{F}\right| + 2n_\times\rho + \mathcal{O}(\rho \log B)$ bits of communication with $\mathcal{O}(\log B)$ rounds, both in the VOLE-hybrid model.

Our novel protocol $\mathsf{LogRobin}\texttt{++}$ achieves the same functionality at the cost of $(n_{\mathit{in}}+n_\times)\log \left|\mathbb{F}\right| + \mathcal{O}(\rho \log B)$ bits of communication with $\mathcal{O}(1)$ rounds in the VOLE-hybrid model. Crucially, $\mathsf{LogRobin}\texttt{++}$ takes advantage of two new techniques -- (1) an $\mathcal{O}(\log B)$-overhead approach to prove in ZK that an IT-MAC commitment vector contains a zero; and (2) the realization of VOLE-based ZK over a disjunctive statement, where $\mathcal{P}$ commits only to $\boldsymbol{w}$ and multiplication outputs of $\mathcal{C}_{\mathit{id}}(\boldsymbol{w})$ (as opposed to prior work where $\mathcal{P}$ commits to $\boldsymbol{w}$ and all three wires that are associated with each multiplication gate).

We implemented $\mathsf{LogRobin}\texttt{++}$ over Boolean (i.e., $\mathbb{F}_2$) and arithmetic (i.e., $\mathbb{F}_{2^{61}-1}$) fields. In our experiments, including the cost of generating VOLE correlations, $\mathsf{LogRobin}\texttt{++}$ achieved up to $170 \times$ optimization over $\mathsf{Robin}$ in communication, resulting in up to $7\times$ (resp. $3\times$) wall-clock time improvements in a WAN-like (resp. LAN-like) setting.

Cryptographic agility, the ability to easily and quickly modify cryptography in a sys- tem, is one of the most important features of any cryptographic system. Any algorithm may be attacked and, at some point in time, be broken. The most obvious solution is to change the cryptographic algorithm, however this has high risk and cost. Another solution is to use agile algorithms. Agile algorithms have security parameters easily changed to increase protection against attacks. In this paper we will show that finite field based algorithms are the most agile of currently used classical cryptography. A critical portion of this will be to show that the bottleneck for the primary costing attack, the number field sieve, is the linear algebra portion of the attack, and not the sieving portion. This paper examines the agility of all three algorithm categories and dispels a few myths about their strengths.

Introduced in [CG24], pseudorandom error-correcting codes (PRCs) are a new cryptographic primitive with applications in watermarking generative AI models. These are codes where a collection of polynomially many codewords is computationally indistinguishable from random, except to individuals with the decoding key. In this work, we examine the assumptions under which PRCs with robustness to a constant error rate exist. 1. We show that if both the planted hyperloop assumption introduced in [BKR23] and security of a version of Goldreich's PRG hold, then there exist public-key PRCs for which no efficient adversary can distinguish a polynomial number of codewords from random with better than $o(1)$ advantage. 2. We revisit the construction of [CG24] and show that it can be based on a wider range of assumptions than presented in [CG24]. To do this, we introduce a weakened version of the planted XOR assumption which we call the weak planted XOR assumption and which may be of independent interest. 3. We initiate the study of PRCs which are secure against space-bounded adversaries. We show how to construct secret-key PRCs of length $O(n)$ which are $\textit{unconditionally}$ indistinguishable from random by $\text{poly}(n)$ time, $O(n^{1.5-\varepsilon})$ space adversaries.