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15 October 2024
University of Georgia, School of Computing
The candidates will work on topics including but not limited to:
- Cryptanalyzing existing cryptographic protocols in the literature and the industry
- Encrypted databases
- Distributed systems
If interested, please send an email (with a CV and cover letter) to Dr. Zichen Gui (Zichen.Gui@uga.edu).
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Zichen Gui (Zichen dot Gui at uga dot edu)
University of Tartu
The cryptography group at the University of Tartu, Estonia, has two openings for tenured lectureships (corresponding to the assistant professorship in the US) in cryptography. The first position is aimed at a person working in modern zero-knowledge proofs, zk-SNARKs, their construction, and security proofs. The person is expected to have a strong cryptography background and several publications in IACR or equivalent conferences. The second position is aimed at a person working at the intersection of coding theory and cryptography, and an interest in hash and code-based zk-SNARKs is appreciated. The person is expected to have a strong background either in coding-theory and cryptography (preferably both) with several publications in IACR or equivalent conferences in cryptography or equivalent venues in coding theory.
Helger Lipmaa leads the cryptography research group, but the department also has a strong coding theory group. Both applicants are expected to collaborate scientifically with the existing groups. Despite the name of the positions, they are research-heavy. We encourage outside activities, like consulting for ZK companies, as long as they are done via the university.
Please contact Helger Lipmaa if you have any questions.
Official application links with other relevant information are at https://ut.ee/en/job-offer/lecturer-cryptography and https://ut.ee/en/job-offer/lecturer-coding-theory-and-cryptography (two separate openings).
Application deadline: 01.11.2024
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Helger Lipmaa (firstname.lastname@gmail.com)
More information: https://crypto.cs.ut.ee/
CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Tenure-Track Faculty in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (f/m/d)
All applicants are expected to grow a research team that pursues an internationally visible research agenda. To aid you in achieving this, CISPA provides institutional base funding for three full-time researcher positions and a generous budget for expenditures. Upon successful tenure evaluation, you will hold a position that is equivalent to an endowed full professorship at a top research university.We invite applications of candidates with excellent track records in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, especially in (but not limited to) the fields of
CISPA values diversity and is committed to equality. We provide special dual-career support. We explicitly encourage female and diverse researchers to apply.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: scientific-recruiting@cispa.de
More information: https://jobs.cispa.saarland/de_DE/jobs/detail/tenure-track-faculty-in-artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning-f-m-d-2024-2025-254
CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Tenure-Track Faculty in all areas related to Information Security (f/m/d)
All applicants are expected to grow a research team that pursues an internationally visible research agenda.To aid you in achieving this, CISPA provides institutional base funding for three full-time researcher positions and a generous budget for expenditures. Upon successful tenure evaluation, you will hold a position that is equivalent to an endowed full professorship at a top research university.
We invite applications of candidates with excellent track records in all areas related to Information Security.
CISPA values diversity and is committed to equality. We provide special dual-career support. We explicitly encourage female and diverse researchers to apply.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: scientific-recruiting@cispa.de
More information: https://jobs.cispa.saarland/de_DE/jobs/detail/tenure-track-faculty-in-all-areas-related-to-information-security-f-m-d-2024-2025-255
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Closing date for applications:
Contact: rafael.dowsley@monash.edu
14 October 2024
Tohru Khorita, Patrick Towa, Zachary J. Williamson
Xinle Cao, Weiqi Feng, Jian Liu, Jinjin Zhou, Wenjing Fang, Lei Wang, Quanqing Xu, Chuanhui Yang, Kui Ren
In this work, we introduce more practical and efficient OMAP constructions. Consistent with all prior OMAPs, our proposed constructions also adapt only the \emph{tree-based Oblivious RAM} (ORAM) to achieve OMAP for enhanced practicality. In terms of complexity, our approach needs only $O(\log{n}/\log{\log{n}})$ interaction rounds and $O(\log^2{n}/\log{\log{n}})$ communication bandwidth per data access, achieving the lowest communication volume to the best our of knowledge. This improvement results from our two main contributions. First, unlike prior works that rely solely on search trees, we design a novel framework for OMAP that combines hash table with search trees. Second, we propose a more efficient tree-based ORAM named DAORAM, which is of significant independent interest. This newly developed ORAM noticeably accelerates our constructions. We implement both our proposed constructions and prior methods to experimentally demonstrate that our constructions substantially outperform prior methods in terms of efficiency.
Vincent Hwang, YoungBeom Kim, Seog Chung Seo
For practical evaluation, we implement assembly programs for the polynomial arithmetic used in the digital signature Dilithium on Cortex-M3. For the modular multiplications in Dilithium, our generalized Barrett multiplications are 1.92 times faster than the state-of-the-art assembly-optimized Montgomery multiplications, leading to 1.38−1.51 times faster Dilithium NTT/iNTT. Along with the improvement in accumulating products, the core polynomial arithmetic matrix-vector multiplications are 1.71−1.77 times faster. We further apply the FFT-based polynomial multiplications over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$ to the challenge polynomial multiplication $c t_0$, leading to 1.31 times faster computation for $c t_0$.
We additionally apply the ideas to Saber on Cortex-M3 and demonstrate their improvement to Dilithium and Saber on our 8-bit AVR environment. For Saber on Cortex-M3, we show that matrix-vector multiplications with FFT-based polynomial multiplications over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$ are 1.42−1.46 faster than the ones with NTT-based polynomial multiplications over NTT-friendly coefficient rings. When moving to a platform with smaller arithmetic precision, such as 8-bit AVR, we improve the matrix-vector multiplication of Dilithium with our Barrett-based NTT/iNTT by a factor of 1.87−1.89. As for Saber on our 8-bit AVR environment, we show that matrix-vector multiplications with NTT-based polynomial multiplications over NTT-friendly coefficient rings are faster than polynomial multiplications over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$ due to the large $k$ in Saber.
Zijing Li, Hongbo Li, Zhengyang Wang
Matteo Campanelli, Mathias Hall-Andersen, Simon Holmgaard Kamp
Abdoulaye Ndiaye
Matteo Campanelli, Agni Datta
Jeremiah Blocki, Seunghoon Lee
Maozhou Huang, Xiangyu Su, Mario Larangeira, Keisuke Tanaka
David Richardson, Mike Rosulek, Jiayu Xu
Zhengjun Cao, Lihua Liu
Yuting Xiao, Rui Zhang, Hong-Sheng Zhou
However, the infeasibility highlighted by Katz et al. (PODC 2014) suggested that it is impossible to construct UC-secure PAKE protocols with a straightforward CoR-setup (i.e., either the CRS is functional but the RO is compromised, or the RO is functional but the CRS is compromised). To circumvent this impossibility result, we investigate how to design UC-secure PAKE protocols with a fine-grained CoR-setup, where either the CRS is functional but the RO is non-functional, or vice versa. Different from the straightforward CoR-setup, a fine-grained non-functional setup is not necessarily completely compromised and fully controlled by the adversary; Instead, we consider this non-functional setup may still offer certain security properties. Certainly, the non-functional setup alone should be useless for achieving UC-security.
We present a UC-secure PAKE protocol under two conditions: either the CRS is functional while the RO is non-functional (falling back to a collision-resistant hash function), or the RO is functional while the CRS is non-functional (falling back to a global CRS). Before presenting our construction, we first prove that a global CRS setup alone is insufficient for achieving UC-secure PAKE. This impossibility result highlights the non-triviality of our approach.
To obtain our construction, we introduce several techniques as follows:
(1) We propose a new variant of Non-Interactive Key Exchange (NIKE), called homomorphic NIKE with associated functions, which captures key properties of existing RO-based PAKE protocols. This new primitive serves as an important component in our construction.
(2) We develop a ``Brute Force'' extraction strategy which allows us to provide security analysis for our UC-secure PAKE with a fine-grained CoR-setup for polynomial-sized password spaces.
(3) We introduce a novel password space extension technique that enables the expansion of PAKE protocols from polynomial-sized to arbitrary-sized password spaces.
(4) Finally, to ensure provable security for our password space extension in UC-secure PAKEs, we modify existing PAKE functionalities to prevent responses that reveal the correctness of password guesses. This is a reasonable adjustment, as our protocol provides only implicit authentication.
We further present a PAKE protocol in the BPR framework (Bellare, Pointcheval, Rogaway, EuroCrypt 2000), assuming either the CRS is functional while the RO falls back to a collision-resistant hash function, or the RO is functional but the CRS trapdoor is allowed to be learned by the adversary.
John Bostanci, Jonas Haferkamp, Dominik Hangleiter, Alexander Poremba
In this work, we seek to make progress on both of these fronts simultaneously---by decoupling quantum pseudorandomness from classical cryptography altogether. We introduce a quantum hardness assumption called the \emph{Hamiltonian Phase State} ($\mathsf{HPS}$) problem, which is the task of decoding output states of a random instantaneous quantum polynomial-time (IQP) circuit. Hamiltonian phase states can be generated very efficiently using only Hadamard gates, single-qubit $Z$ rotations and CNOT circuits. We show that the hardness of our problem reduces to a worst-case version of the problem, and we provide evidence that our assumption is plausibly fully quantum; meaning, it cannot be used to construct one-way functions. We also show information-theoretic hardness when only few copies of $\mathsf{HPS}$ are available by proving an approximate $t$-design property of our ensemble. Finally, we show that our $\mathsf{HPS}$ assumption and its variants allow us to efficiently construct many pseudorandom quantum primitives, ranging from pseudorandom states, to quantum pseudoentanglement, to pseudorandom unitaries, and even primitives such as public-key encryption with quantum keys. Along the way, we analyze a natural iterative construction of pseudorandom unitaries which resembles a candidate of Ji, Liu, and Song (CRYPTO'18).
Jaehyung Kim, Taeyeong Noh
Our key observation is that at the very bottom modulus, plaintexts encoded in the least significant bits can still enjoy the inherent modular reduction of RLWE. We suggest incorporating modular reduction as a primary operation for CKKS and exploring its impact on efficiency. We constructed a novel homomorphic modular reduction algorithm using the discrete bootstrapping from Bae et al. [Asiacrypt'24] and a new discretization algorithm from modulus switching. One of the key advantages of our modular reduction is that its computational complexity grows sublinearly ($O(\log k)$) as we increase the input range $[0,k)$, which is asymptotically better than the state-of-the-art with $\geq O(k)$.
We checked our algorithms with concrete experiments. Notably, our modulo 1 function for input range $[0, 2^{20})$ takes only 44.9 seconds with 13.3 bits of (mean) precision, in a single-threaded CPU. Recall that modular reduction over such a large range was almost infeasible in the previous works, as they need to evaluate a polynomial of degree $> 2^{20}$ (or equivalent). As an application of our method, we compared a bit decomposition based on our framework with the state-of-the-art method from Drucker et al. [J.Cryptol'24]. Our method is $7.1 \times$ faster while reducing the failure probability by more than two orders of magnitude.
Youngjin Bae, Jaehyung Kim, Damien Stehlé, Elias Suvanto
Inspired by the design by Bae et al. [Eurocrypt'24] of a dedicated bootstrapping algorithm for ciphertexts encoding bits, we propose a CKKS bootstrapping algorithm, $\mathsf{SI\mbox{-}BTS}$ (small-integer bootstrapping), for ciphertexts encoding small bit-length integers. For this purpose, we build upon the DM/CGGI-to-CKKS conversion algorithm from Boura et al. [J. Math. Cryptol.'20], to bootstrap canonically embedded integers to integers embedded as roots of unity. $\mathsf{SI\mbox{-}BTS}$ allows functional bootstrapping: it can evaluate an arbitrary function of its input while bootstrapping. It may also be used to batch-(functional-)bootstrap multiple DM/CGGI ciphertexts. For example, its amortized cost for evaluating an 8-bit look-up table on $2^{12}$ DM/CGGI ciphertexts is 3.75ms (single-thread CPU, 128-bit security).
We adapt $\mathsf{SI\mbox{-}BTS}$ to simultaneously bootstrap multiple CKKS ciphertexts for bits. The resulting $\mathsf{BB\mbox{-}BTS}$ algorithm (batch-bits bootstrapping) allows to decrease the amortized cost of a binary gate evaluation. Compared to Bae et al., it gives a 2.4x speed-up.