International Association for Cryptologic Research

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07 February 2025

Nomos
Job Posting Job Posting
Nomos is a new blockchain designed from the ground up with the original cypherpunk ethos: decentralization, censorship resistance, permissionless-ness and privacy. It will serve as the trustless agreements layer of the Logos stack. The forthcoming Nomos network will provide a common infrastructure layer upon which communities and aspiring network states can build social, governance, and financial services that uphold their community members’ fundamental rights and values.

Key Responsibilities
  • Develop and analyze advanced algorithms for complex systems, focusing on privacy, efficiency and scalability.
  • Understand engineering requirements and translate them into mathematical models for their analysis.
  • Formalize and prove properties of protocols and algorithms currently in development by our team.
  • Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, translating theoretical constructs into commercially viable solutions.
  • Lead the applied research efforts, bridging academic rigor with practical, industry-focused outcomes.

    Ideally, you will have
  • Strong background in computer science or applied mathematics: advanced analysis of algorithms, complex systems and/or stochastic processes.
  • Proven track record of using advanced mathematical tools to tackle real-world problems.
  • Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to convey complex ideas clearly both in written and verbal form.
  • Experience with or strong interest in blockchain, cryptography, distributed systems or networks.

    Bonus points
  • Exposure to blockchain concepts or decentralized technologies.
  • Familiarity with cryptography and open-source contributions.
  • Familiarity with differential privacy analysis.
  • Advanced degree (PhD or MsC with significant research experience) in Mathematics, Theoretical Computer Science, or a related field—paired with commercial experience

    Closing date for applications:

    Contact: angel@status.im

    More information: https://boards.greenhouse.io/logos/jobs/6526845

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    Vahid Jahandideh, Bart Mennink, Lejla Batina
    ePrint Report ePrint Report
    Side-channel attacks (SCAs) pose a significant threat to the implementations of lightweight ciphers, particularly in resource-constrained environments where masking—the primary countermeasure—is constrained by tight resource limitations. This makes it crucial to reduce the resource and randomness requirements of masking schemes. In this work, we investigate an approach to minimize the randomness complexity of masking algorithms. Specifically, we explore the theoretical foundations of deterministic higher-order masking, which relies solely on offline randomness present in the initial input shares and eliminates the need for online (fresh) randomness during internal computations. We demonstrate the feasibility of deterministic masking for ciphers such as Ascon, showing that their diffusion layer can act as a refresh subcircuit. This ensures that, up to a threshold number, probes placed in different rounds remain independent. Based on this observation, we propose composition theorems for deterministic masking schemes. On the practical side, we extend the proof of first- and second-order probing security for Ascon’s protected permutation from a single round to an arbitrary number of rounds
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    Chao Niu, Muzhou Li, Jifu Zhang, Meiqin Wang
    ePrint Report ePrint Report
    SIMON is a lightweight block cipher proposed by the National Security Agency. According to previous cryptanalytic results on SIMON, differential and linear cryptanalysis are the two most effective attacks on it. Usually, there are many trails sharing the same input and output differences (resp. masks). These trails comprise the differential (resp. linear hull) and can be used together when mounting attacks. In ASIACRYPT 2021, Leurent et al. proposed a matrix-based method on SIMON-like ciphers, where only trails whose active bits stay in a $w$-bit window are considered. The static window in each round is chosen to be $w$ least significant bits. They applied this efficient framework on SIMON and SIMECK, and have obtained many better differentials and linear hulls than before. For SIMON, they also found that there seems to be some potential for improvement, which should be further investigated.

    In this paper, we dynamically choose window for each round to achieve better distinguishers. Benefiting from these dynamic windows, we can obtain stronger differentials and linear hulls than previously proposed for almost all versions of SIMON. Finally, we provided the best differential/linear attacks on SIMON48, SIMON64, and SIMON96 in terms of round number, complexity, or success rate.
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    Zhe Li, Chaoping Xing, Yizhou Yao, Chen Yuan
    ePrint Report ePrint Report
    Lund et al. (JACM 1992) invented the powerful Sumcheck protocol that has been extensively used in complexity theory and also for designing concretely efficient (zero-knowledge) arguments. In this work, we systematically study Sumcheck in the context of secure multi-party computation (MPC). Our main result is a new generic framework for lifting semi-honest MPC protocols to malicious security, with a {\em constant} multiplicative overhead in {\em both} computation and communication, and even additional logarithmic communication in the best case. In general, our approach applies to any semi-honest linear secret-sharing based MPC secure up to additive attacks, where secret-sharings can be added with an authentication property. At a high-level, our approach has a highly distributive flavor, where the parties jointly emulate a Sumcheck prover that proves the correctness of MPC semi-honest evaluations in zero-knowledge, meanwhile they also jointly emulate a Sumcheck verifier and verify the proof themselves. Along the way, we provide a new angle of view on the {\em fully linear interactive oracle proof} (FLIOP) systems proposed by Boneh et al. (CRYPTO 2019). That is, essentially distributed sumcheck on proving a batch of multiplications is an optimized concrete instantiation of the FLIOP-based approach.

    As concrete applications of our techniques, we first consider semi-honest MPC protocols based on Shamir secret-sharing with an honest majority. Suppose $M$-party and circuit size $N$, to achieve malicious security, our approach only introduces additional $10MN+O(M\log{N})$ total computation, communication of reconstructions of $4\log{N}+6$ secret-shared values, $O(\log{N})$ rounds and $O(\log{N})$ correlated randomness. This shows that malicious security with abort in honest majority MPC comes {\em free} in terms of both computation and communication.

    We then consider dishonest majority MPC, where the best known semi-honest protocol achieves $2N$ online communication per party and sublinear preprocessing by using programmable pseudorandom correlation generators (PCGs). We realize malicious MPC with $4N+O(\log{N})$ online communication as well as sublinear preprocessing, matching the optimal $2\times$ communication overhead in Hazay et al. (JOC 2024). Our protocol is essentially obtained by using Sumcheck techniques to check authenticated multiplication triple relations, which requires only $N+1$ {\em standard Beaver triples} and $O(\log{N})$ random authenticated shares for $N$ semi-honestly generated authenticated triples. Compared to the FLIOP-based checking mechanism (Boyle et al. CRYPTO 2022) that requires $O(\sqrt{N})$ communication and $O(N^{1.5})$ computation, we do not introduce any cryptographic assumption beyond PCGs, and have $O(N)$ computation.
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    Aniket Kate, Easwar Vivek Mangipudi, Charan Nomula, Raghavendra Ramesh, Athina Terzoglou, Joshua Tobkin
    ePrint Report ePrint Report
    Cross-chain bridges, realizing the transfer of information and assets between blockchains, form the core of blockchain interoperability solutions. Most existing bridge networks are modeled in an honest-malicious setting, where the bridge nodes are either honest or malicious. Rationality allows the nodes to deviate from the protocol arbitrarily for an economic incentive. In this work, we present HyperLoop, an efficient cross-chain multi-signature bridge and prove that it is safe and live game-theoretically, under the more realistic rational-malicious model.

    As rational bridge nodes are allowed to deviate from the protocol and even collude, a monitor mechanism is necessitated, which we realize by introducing whistle-blower nodes. These whistle-blowers constantly check the operations of the bridge and raise complaints to a complaint resolution network in case of discrepancies. To enforce punishments, it is necessary for the nodes to stake an amount before participating as bridge nodes. Consequently, a cap on the volume of funds transferred over the bridge is established. We describe a sliding window mechanism and establish a relation between the stake and the sliding window limit necessary for the safety of the bridge.

    Our design yields an economic, computation, and communication-efficient bridge. We realize and deploy our bridge prototype bridging Ethereum and Polygon chains over testnets. For a 19-node bridge network, each bridge node takes an average of only 3 msec to detect and sign a source chain request, showing the highly efficiency and low-latency of the bridge.
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    Joël Alwen, Georg Fuchsbauer, Marta Mularczyk
    ePrint Report ePrint Report
    We revisit Updatable Public-Key Encryption (UPKE), which was introduced as a practical mechanism for building forward-secure cryptographic protocols. We begin by observing that all UPKE notions to date are neither syntactically flexible nor secure enough for the most important multi-party protocols motivating UPKE. We provide an intuitive taxonomy of UPKE properties -- some partially or completely overlooked in the past -- along with an overview of known (explicit and implicit) UPKE constructions. We then introduce a formal UPKE definition capturing all intuitive properties needed for multi-party protocols.

    Next, we provide a practical pairing-based construction for which we provide concrete security bounds under a standard assumption in the random oracle and the algebraic group model. The efficiency profile of the scheme compares very favorably with existing UPKE constructions (despite the added flexibility and stronger security). For example, when used to improve the forward security of the Messaging Layer Security protocol [RFC9420], our new UPKE construction requires $\approx 1\%$ of the bandwidth of the next-most efficient UPKE construction satisfying the strongest UPKE notion previously considered.
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    Lucjan Hanzlik, Aniket Kate, Easwar Vivek Mangipudi, Pratyay Mukherjee, Sri AravindaKrishnan Thyagarajan
    ePrint Report ePrint Report
    Blockchain service offerings have seen a rapid rise in recent times. Many of these services realize a decentralized architecture with a threshold adversary to avoid a single point of failure and to mitigate key escrow issues. While payments to such services are straightforward in systems supporting smart contracts, achieving fairness poses challenges in systems like Bitcoin, adhering to the UTXO model with limited scripting capabilities. This is especially challenging without smart contracts, as we wish to pay only the required threshold of t + 1 out of the n servers offering the service together, without any server claiming the payment twice.

    In this paper, we introduce VITARIT 1, a novel payment solution tailored for threshold cryptographic services in UTXO systems like Bitcoin. Our approach guarantees robust provable security while facilitating practical deployment. We focus on the t-out-of-n distributed threshold verifiable random function (VRF) service with certain properties, such as threshold BLS signatures, a recently highlighted area of interest. Our protocol enables clients to request verifiable random function (VRF) values from the threshold service, triggering payments to up to t + 1 servers of the distributed threshold VRF.

    Our efficient design relies on simple transactions using signature verification scripts, making it immediately applicable in Bitcoin-like systems. We also introduce new tools and techniques at both the cryptographic and transaction layers, including a novel signature-VRF exchange protocol for standard constructions, which may be of independent interest. Addition- ally, our transaction flow design prevents malicious servers from claiming payments twice, offering broader implications for decentralized payment systems. Our prototype implementation shows that in the two-party interaction, the client takes 126.4 msec, and the server takes 204 msec, demonstrating practicality and deployability of the system
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    Nick Aquina, Bruno Cimoli, Soumya Das, Kathrin Hövelmanns, Fiona Johanna Weber, Chigo Okonkwo, Simon Rommel, Boris Škorić, Idelfonso Tafur Monroy, Sebastian Verschoor
    ePrint Report ePrint Report
    Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is currently being discussed as a technology to safeguard communication in a future where quantum computers compromise traditional public-key cryptosystems. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive security evaluation of QKD-based solutions, focusing on real-world use cases sourced from academic literature and industry reports. We analyze these use cases, assess their security and identify the possible advantages of deploying QKD-based solutions. We further compare QKD-based solutions with Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), the alternative approach to achieving security when quantum computers compromise traditional public-key cryptosystems, evaluating their respective suitability for each scenario. Based on this comparative analysis, we critically discuss and comment on which use cases QKD is suited for, considering factors such as implementation complexity, scalability, and long-term security. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the role QKD could play in future cryptographic infrastructures and offer guidance to decision-makers considering the deployment of QKD.
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    Junkai Liang, Daqi Hu, Pengfei Wu, Yunbo Yang, Qingni Shen, Zhonghai Wu
    ePrint Report ePrint Report
    Zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (zk-SNARKs) are a powerful tool for proving computation correctness, attracting significant interest from researchers, developers, and users. However, the complexity of zk-SNARKs has created gaps between these groups, hindering progress. Researchers focus on constructing efficient proving systems with stronger security and new properties, while developers and users prioritize toolchains, usability, and compatibility.

    In this work, we provide a comprehensive study of zk-SNARK, from theory to practice, pinpointing gaps and limitations. We first present a master recipe that unifies the main steps in converting a program into a zk-SNARK. We then classify existing zk-SNARKs according to their key techniques. Our classification addresses the main difference in practically valuable properties between existing zk-SNARK schemes. We survey over 40 zk-SNARKs since 2013 and provide a reference table listing their categories and properties. Following the steps in master recipe, we then survey 11 general-purpose popular used libraries. We elaborate on these libraries' usability, compatibility, efficiency and limitations. Since installing and executing these zk-SNARK systems is challenging, we also provide a completely virtual environment in which to run the compiler for each of them. We identify that the proving system is the primary focus in cryptography academia. In contrast, the constraint system presents a bottleneck in industry. To bridge this gap, we offer recommendations and advocate for the opensource community to enhance documentation, standardization and compatibility.
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    Alex Charlès, Aleksei Udovenko
    ePrint Report ePrint Report
    In white-box cryptography, early encoding-based countermeasures have been broken by the DCA attack, leading to the utilization of masking schemes against a surge of automated attacks. The recent filtering attack from CHES 2024 broke the last viable masking scheme from CHES 2021 resisting both computational and algebraic attacks, raising the need for new countermeasures.

    In this work, we perform the first formal study of the combinations of existing countermeasures and demonstrate that applying Dummy Shuffling (EUROCRYPT 2021) then ISW masking (CRYPTO 2003) to a circuit carries algebraic, correlation, and filtering security - necessary conditions to withstand state-of-the-art automated attacks. We also show that applying these two countermeasures in the opposite order leads to a Higher-Order Filtering attack, highlighting the importance of the order of application of the combined countermeasures.

    We also propose a new masking scheme called S5, standing for the Semi-Shuffled Secret Sharing Scheme, a scheme merging Dummy Shuffling and ISW in a single countermeasure more efficiently than a direct composition.
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    Mohamed Abdelmonem, Lukas Holzbaur, Håvard Raddum, Alexander Zeh
    ePrint Report ePrint Report
    The Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) is a crucial component in many post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) algorithms, enabling efficient polynomial multiplication. However, the reliability of NTT computations is an important concern, especially for safety-critical applications. This work presents novel techniques to improve the fault tolerance of NTTs used in prominent PQC schemes such as Kyber, Dilithium, and Falcon. The work first establishes a theoretical framework for error detection in NTTs, exploiting the inherent algebraic properties of these transforms. It derives necessary and sufficient conditions for constructing error-detecting vectors that can identify single faults without the need for costly recomputation. For the Dilithium scheme, the work further advances the state-of-the-art by developing the first algorithm capable of detecting up to two maliciously placed faults. The proposed error detection methods are shown to reduce the number of required multiplications by half, leading to significant improvements in computational efficiency compared to existing single error-detecting algorithms. Concrete implementations for Kyber, Dilithium, and Falcon demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of the error-detection scheme.
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    Zhe Li, Chaoping Xing, Yizhou Yao, Chen Yuan
    ePrint Report ePrint Report
    Correlated randomness lies at the core of efficient modern secure multi-party computation (MPC) protocols. Costs of generating such correlated randomness required for the MPC online phase protocol often constitute a bottleneck in the overall protocol. A recent paradigm of {\em pseudorandom correlation generator} (PCG) initiated by Boyle et al. (CCS'18, Crypto'19) offers an appealing solution to this issue. In sketch, each party is given a short PCG seed, which can be locally expanded into long correlated strings, satisfying the target correlation. Among various types of correlations, there is oblivious linear evaluation (OLE), a fundamental and useful primitive for typical MPC protocols on arithmetic circuits. Towards efficient generating a great amount of OLE, and applications to MPC protocols, we establish the following results:

    (i) We propose a novel {\em programmable} PCG construction for OLE over any field $\mathbb{F}_p$. For $kN$ OLE correlations, we require $O(k\log{N})$ communication and $O(k^2N\log{N})$ computation, where $k$ is an arbitrary integer $\geq 2$. Previous works either have quadratic computation (Boyle et al. Crypto'19), or can only support fields of size larger than $2$ (Bombar et al. Crypto'23).

    (ii) We extend the above OLE construction to provide various types of correlations for any finite field. One of the fascinating applications is an efficient PCG for two-party {\em authenticated Boolean multiplication triples}. For $kN$ authenticated triples, we offer PCGs with seed size of $O(k^2\log{N})$ bits. To our best knowledge, such correlation has not been realized with sublinear communication and quasi-linear computation ever before.

    (iii) In addition, the \emph{programmability} admits efficient PCGs for multi-party Boolean triples, and thus the first efficient MPC protocol for Boolean circuits with {\em silent} preprocessing. In particular, we show $kN$ $m$-party Boolean multiplication triples can be generated in $O(m^2k\log{N})$-bit communication, while the state-of-the-art FOLEAGE (Asiacrypt'24) requires a broadcast channel and takes $mkN+O(m^2\log{kN})$ bits communication.

    (iv) Finally, we present efficient PCGs for circuit-dependent preprocessing, matrix multiplications triples, and string OTs etc. Compared to previous works, each has its own right.
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    05 February 2025

    Oriol Farràs, Miquel Guiot
    ePrint Report ePrint Report
    A secret sharing scheme is a cryptographic primitive that allows a dealer to share a secret among a set of parties, so that only authorized subsets of them can recover it. The access structure of the scheme is the family of authorized subsets. In a weighted threshold secret sharing scheme, each party is assigned a weight according to its importance, and the authorized subsets are those in which the sum of their weights is at least the threshold value.

    For these access structures, the best general constructions were presented by Beimel and Weinreb [IPL 2006]: The scheme with perfect security has share size $n^{O(\log n)}$, while the scheme with computational security has share size polynomial in $n$. However, these constructions require the use of shallow monotone sorting networks, which limits their practical use.

    In this context, we revisit this work and provide variants of these constructions that are feasible in practice. This is done by considering alternative circuits and formulas for weighted threshold functions that do not require monotone sorting networks. We show that, under the assumption that subexponentially secure one-way functions exist, any WTAS over $n$ parties and threshold $\sigma$ admits a computational secret sharing scheme where the size of the shares is $\mathrm{polylog}(n)$ and the size of the public information is $O(n^2\log n\log \sigma)$. Moreover, we show that any authorized subset only needs to download $O(n\log n\log \sigma)$ bits of public information to recover the secret.
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    Mahdi Soleimani, Grace Jia, In Gim, Seung-seob Lee, Anurag Khandelwal
    ePrint Report ePrint Report
    Recent server-side optimizations like speculative decoding significantly enhance the interactivity and resource efficiency of Large Language Model (LLM) services. However, we show that these optimizations inadvertently introduce new side-channel vulnerabilities through network packet timing and size variations that tend to be input-dependent. Network adversaries can leverage these side channels to learn sensitive information contained in \emph{encrypted} user prompts to and responses from public LLM services.

    This paper formalizes the security implications using a novel indistinguishability framework and introduces a novel attack that establishes the insecurity of real-world LLM services with streaming APIs under our security framework.

    Our proposed attack effectively deconstructs encrypted network packet traces to reveal the sizes of underlying LLM-generated tokens and whether the tokens were generated with or without certain server-side optimizations. Our attack can accurately predict private attributes in real-world privacy-sensitive LLM applications in medicine and finance with $71$--$92\%$ accuracy on an open-source vLLM service and $50$--$90\%$ accuracy on the commercial ChatGPT service. Finally, we show that solutions that hide these side channels to different degrees expose a tradeoff between security and performance --- specifically, interactivity and network bandwidth overheads.
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    Abhraneel Dutta, Emrah Karagoz, Edoardo Persichetti, Pakize Sanal
    ePrint Report ePrint Report
    The computation of the inverse of a polynomial over a quotient ring or a finite field plays a very important role during the key generation of post-quantum cryptosystems like NTRU, BIKE, and LEDACrypt. It is therefore important that there exist an efficient algorithm capable of running in constant time, to prevent timing side-channel attacks. In this article, we study both constant-time algorithms based on Fermat's Little Theorem and the Extended $GCD$ Algorithm, and provide a detailed comparison in terms of performance. According to our conclusion, we see that the constant-time Extended $GCD$-based Bernstein-Yang's algorithm shows a better performance with 1.76x-3.76x on \texttt{x86} platforms compared to FLT-based methods. Although we report numbers from a software implementation, we additionally provide a short glimpse of some recent results when these two algorithms are implemented on various hardware platforms. Finally, we also explore other exponentiation algorithms that work similarly to the Itoh-Tsuji inversion method. These algorithms perform fewer polynomial multiplications and show a better performance with 1.56x-1.96x on \texttt{x86} platform compared to Itoh-Tsuji inversion method.
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    Jiacheng Gao, Yuan Zhang, Sheng Zhong
    ePrint Report ePrint Report
    In this paper, we revisit shuffle protocol for Shamir secret sharing. Upon examining previous works, we observe that existing constructions either produce non-uniform shuffle or require large communication and round complexity, e.g. exponential in the number of parties. We propose two shuffle protocols, both of which shuffle uniformly within $O(\frac{k + l}{\log k}n^2m\log m)$ communication for shuffling rows of an $m\times l$ matrix shared among $n$ parties, where $k\leq m$ is a parameter balancing communication and computation. Our first construction is more concretely efficient, while our second construction requires only $O(nml)$ online communication within $O(n)$ round. In terms of overall communication and online communication, both shuffle protocols outperform current optimal shuffle protocols for Shamir secret sharing. At the core of our constructions is a novel permutation-sharing technique, which can be used to permute arbitrarily many vectors by computing matrix-vector products. Once shared, applying a permutation becomes much cheaper, which results in a faster online phase. Letting each party share one secret uniform permutation in the offline phase and applying them sequentially in the online phase, we obtain our first shuffle protocol. To further optimize online complexity and simplify the trade-off, we adopt the shuffle correlation proposed by Gao et al. and obtain the second shuffle protocol with $O(nml)$ online communication and $O(n^2ml)$ online computation. This brings an additional benefit that the online complexity is now independent of offline complexity, which reduces parameter optimization to optimizing offline efficiency.

    Our constructions require only most basic primitives in Shamir secret sharing scheme, and work for arbitrary field $\mathbb{F}$ of size larger than $n$. As shuffle is a frequent operation in algorithm design, we expect them to accelerate many other primitives in context of Shamir secret sharing MPC, such as sorting, oblivious data structure, etc.
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    Rishab Goyal, Saikumar Yadugiri
    ePrint Report ePrint Report
    Multi-Authority Functional Encryption ($\mathsf{MA}$-$\mathsf{FE}$) [Chase, TCC'07; Lewko-Waters, Eurocrypt'11; Brakerski et al., ITCS'17] is a popular generalization of functional encryption ($\mathsf{FE}$) with the central goal of decentralizing the trust assumption from a single central trusted key authority to a group of multiple, independent and non-interacting, key authorities. Over the last several decades, we have seen tremendous advances in new designs and constructions for $\mathsf{FE}$ supporting different function classes, from a variety of assumptions and with varying levels of security. Unfortunately, the same has not been replicated in the multi-authority setting. The current scope of $\mathsf{MA}$-$\mathsf{FE}$ designs is rather limited, with positive results only known for (all-or-nothing) attribute-based functionalities, or need full power of general-purpose code obfuscation. This state-of-the-art in $\mathsf{MA}$-$\mathsf{FE}$ could be explained in part by the implication provided by Brakerski et al. (ITCS'17). It was shown that a general-purpose obfuscation scheme can be designed from any $\mathsf{MA}$-$\mathsf{FE}$ scheme for circuits, even if the $\mathsf{MA}$-$\mathsf{FE}$ scheme is secure only in a bounded-collusion model, where at most two keys per authority get corrupted.

    In this work, we revisit the problem of $\mathsf{MA}$-$\mathsf{FE}$, and show that existing implication from $\mathsf{MA}$-$\mathsf{FE}$ to obfuscation is not tight. We provide new methods to design $\mathsf{MA}$-$\mathsf{FE}$ for circuits from simple and minimal cryptographic assumptions. Our main contributions are summarized below

    1. We design a $\mathsf{poly}(\lambda)$-authority $\mathsf{MA}$-$\mathsf{FE}$ for circuits in the bounded-collusion model. Under the existence of public-key encryption, we prove it to be statically simulation-secure. Further, if we assume sub-exponential security of public-key encryption, then we prove it to be adaptively simulation-secure in the Random Oracle Model. 2. We design a $O(1)$-authority $\mathsf{MA}$-$\mathsf{FE}$ for circuits in the bounded-collusion model. Under the existence of 2/3-party non-interactive key exchange, we prove it to be adaptively simulation-secure. 3. We provide a new generic bootstrapping compiler for $\mathsf{MA}$-$\mathsf{FE}$ for general circuits to design a simulation-secure $(n_1 + n_2)$-authority $\mathsf{MA}$-$\mathsf{FE}$ from any two $n_1$-authority and $n_2$-authority $\mathsf{MA}$-$\mathsf{FE}$.
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    Olivier Bernard, Marc Joye
    ePrint Report ePrint Report
    The GINX method in TFHE offers low-latency ciphertext bootstrapping with relatively small bootstrapping keys, but is limited to binary or ternary key distributions. In contrast, the AP method supports arbitrary key distributions, however at the cost of significantly large bootstrapping keys. Building on AP, automorphism-based methods (LMK⁺, EUROCRYPT 2023) achieve smaller keys, though each automorphism application necessitates a key switch, introducing computational overhead and noise. This paper advances automorphism-based methods in two important ways. First, it proposes a novel traversal blind rotation algorithm that optimizes the number of key switches for a given key material. Second, it introduces an automorphism-parametrized external product that seamlessly applies an automorphism to one of the input ciphertexts. Together, these techniques substantially reduce the number of key switches, resulting in faster bootstrapping and improved noise control. As an independent contribution, this paper also introduce a comprehensive theoretical framework for analyzing the expected number of automorphism key switches, whose predictions perfectly align with the results of extensive numerical experiments, demonstrating its practical relevance. In a typical setting, by utilizing additional key material, the LLW⁺ approach (TCHES 2024) reduces key switches by 17% compared to LMK⁺. Our combined techniques achieve a 46% reduction using similar key material and can eliminate an arbitrary large number (e.g., > 99%) of key switches with only a moderate (9x) increase in key material size.
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    Francesca Falzon, Tianxin Tang
    ePrint Report ePrint Report
    Private Join and Compute (PJC) is a two-party protocol recently proposed by Google for various use-cases, including ad conversion (Asiacrypt 2021) and which generalizes their deployed private set intersection sum (PSI-SUM) protocol (EuroS&P 2020).

    PJC allows two parties, each holding a key-value database, to privately evaluate the inner product of the values whose keys lie in the intersection. While the functionality output is not typically considered in the security model of the MPC literature, it may pose real-world privacy risks, thus raising concerns about the potential deployment of protocols like PJC.

    In this work, we analyze the risks associated with the PJC functionality output. We consider an adversary that is a participating party of PJC and describe four practical attacks that break the other party's input privacy, and which are able to recover both membership of keys in the intersection and their associated values. Our attacks consider the privacy threats associated with deployment and highlight the need to include the functionality output as part of the MPC security model.
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    Foteini Baldimtsi, Julia Kastner, Julian Loss, Omar Renawi
    ePrint Report ePrint Report
    Anonymous Attribute-Based Credentials (ABCs) allow users to prove possession of attributes while adhering to various authentication policies and without revealing unnecessary information. Single-use ABCs are particularly appealing for their lightweight nature and practical efficiency. These credentials are typically built using blind signatures, with Anonymous Credentials Light (ACL) being one of the most prominent schemes in the literature. However, the security properties of single-use ABCs, especially their secure showing property, have not been fully explored, and prior definitions and corresponding security proofs fail to address scenarios involving partial attribute disclosure effectively. In this work, we propose a stronger secure showing definition that ensures robust security even under selective attribute revelation. Our definition extends the winning condition of the existing secure showing experiment by adding various constraints on the subsets of opened attributes. We show how to represent this winning condition as a matching problem in a suitable bipartite graph, thus allowing for it to be verified efficiently. We then prove that ACL satisfies our strong secure showing notion without any modification. Finally, we define double-spending prevention for single-use ABCs, and show how ACL satisfies the definition.
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