International Association
for Cryptologic Research

In our work, we introduce BATTLE, Bonded Adversarial TournamenT with Logarithmic Escalation, a tournament-style protocol that solves multiparty disputes with simultaneous assertions such that (i) bounds honest asserter capital requirements to a constant minimum initial capital and (ii) resolves any number $C$ of concurrent challenges in $\mathcal{O}(\log C)$ dispute rounds, by reinvesting dispute rewards to fund subsequent rounds (progressive buy-ins) (iii) can be realized on a stateful (Quasi)Turing-complete smart-contract enabled blockchain. BATTLE solves a set of conflicting assertions by creating a tournament with two phases: (1) a bracket among competing asserters with one dispute per party per round, and (2) a challenger phase against the winning assertion where the asserter engages in increasing number of simultaneous disputes each round.

The long-term success of cryptocurrencies largely depends on the incentive compatibility provided to the validators. Bribery attacks, facilitated trustlessly via smart contracts, threaten this foundation. This work introduces, implements, and evaluates three novel and efficient bribery contracts targeting Ethereum validators. The first bribery contract enables a briber to fork the blockchain by buying votes on their proposed blocks. The second contract incentivizes validators to voluntarily exit the consensus protocol, thus increasing the adversary's relative staking power. The third contract builds a trustless bribery market that enables the briber to auction off their manipulative power over the RANDAO, Ethereum's distributed randomness beacon. Finally, we provide an initial game-theoretical analysis of one of the described bribery markets.

A weak pseudorandom function $F: \mathcal{K} \times \mathcal{X} \rightarrow \mathcal{Y}$ is said to be ring key-homomorphic if, given $F \left(k_{1}, x \right)$ and $F \left(k_{2}, x \right)$, there are efficient algorithms to compute $F \left(k_{1} \oplus k_{2}, x \right)$ and $F \left(k_{1} \otimes k_{2}, x \right)$ where $\oplus$ and $\otimes$ are the addition and multiplication operations in the ring $\mathcal{K}$, respectively. A recent work by Alamati et al. (CT-RSA' 23) initiated the study of ring key-homomorphic weak PRFs (RKHwPRFs) and showed that any RKHwPRF can be used to construct multiparty noninteractive key exchange (NIKE) for an arbitrary number of parties. In this work, we show that any RKHwPRF can, in fact, be used to construct indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) for all circuits in NC$^1$, which in turn can be bootstrapped to all polynomial-size circuits using standard techniques. The proof of security for our iO construction is in the standard model, and our assumptions (including weakenings of RKHwPRFs) are program-independent.

We also consider restricted versions of RKHwPRFs that are structurally weaker than a classic RKHwPRF but suffice for all our constructions. We show how to instantiate these restricted RKHwPRFs from various multilinear maps and associated assumptions. Our framework gives several new results, notably the first iO scheme that relies on SXDH over the multilinear map presented by Ma and Zhandry (TCC' 18) (the authors only presented a NIKE protocol in their paper). To our knowledge, this candidate multilinear map has not been successfully cryptanalyzed, and the SXDH assumption plausibly holds over it.

Our result in a sense completes the work initiated by Alamati et al. (Eurocrypt' 19, JoC '23) on building cryptosystems from generic Minicrypt primitives with structure. Given our construction of iO from RKHwPRFs, almost all of the major known cryptosystems can be built from a weak PRF with either a group or ring homomorphism over either the input space or the key space. Thus, a major contribution of this work is advancing the study of the relationship between structure and cryptography.

Functional bootstrapping is a core technique in Fully Homomorphic Encryption(FHE). For large plaintext, to evaluate a general function homomorphically over a ciphertext, in the FHEW/TFHE approach, since the function in look-up table form is encoded in the coefficients of a test polynomial, the degree of the polynomial must be high enough to hold the entire table. This increases the bootstrapping time complexity and memory cost, as the size of bootstrapping keys and keyswitching keys need to be large accordingly.

In this paper, we propose to encode the look-up table of any function in a polynomial vector, whose coefficients can hold more data. The corresponding representation of the additive group ${\mathbb Z}_q$ used in the RGSW-based bootstrapping is the group of monic monomial permutation matrices, which integrates the permutation matrix representation used by Alperin-Sheriff and Peikert in 2014, and the monic monomial representation used in the FHEW/TFHE scheme. We make comprehensive investigation of the new representation, and propose a new bootstrapping algorithm based on it.

The new algorithm supports functional bootstrapping of large-plaintexts, and achieves polynomial reduction in key sizes and a constant-factor improvement in run-time cost.

Shannon’s 1949 theorem defines perfect secrecy as a condition where every possible message remains equally likely given any ciphertext, which requires a key at least as long as the message. This definition, while foundational, is binary and assumes uniform message priors—assumptions rarely met in real communication systems. It cannot express the fact that secrecy degrades gradually as key entropy decreases, and it does not account for semantic structure or contextual knowledge available to adversaries.

This paper extends Shannon’s framework by introducing Operational Perfect Secrecy (OPS), which defines secrecy in terms of adversarial success probability rather than requiring complete message-space coverage. Within this framework we also define two new forms of information-theoretic security: Combinatorial ITS (C-ITS), which achieves OPS through combinatorial ambiguity of candidate decryptions, and Dimensional Ambiguity ITS (DA-ITS), which achieves OPS by concealing the dimensionality of the key space itself. We show that OPS converges to Shannon secrecy when the support size approaches the message space, while providing meaningful guarantees even with shorter keys.

These results generalise the concept of perfect secrecy into a continuous, operational measure and establish a new theoretical foundation for scalable information-theoretic security.

Real-world-asset (RWA) tokens endow underlying assets with fractional ownership and more continuous settlement, yet recording these claims on transparent public ledgers exposes flows and positions, undermining market confidentiality. Practical deployments must reconcile enforceable access control with principled privacy once assets are shielded. We present UltraMixer, a noncustodial privacy layer natively compatible with ERC-3643. Compliance is enforced at the boundary via zero-knowledge proofs of whitelist membership, while in-mixer transfers and atomic trades operate over commitments with nullifiers to prevent double-spend. A generalized UTXO encoding supports heterogeneous assets (fungible and non-fungible) under a unified commitment scheme. For selective disclosure, UltraMixer provides a verdict-only $\Delta$-Window Proof of Holding that attests to continuous ownership across a time interval without revealing balances, identities, or linkages. Gas-aware batching and composable emergency controls (pause, freeze/unfreeze, force-transfer) preserve practicality and governance. The resulting architecture delivers regulator-compatible confidentiality for permissioned RWA markets.

Efficient Verifiable Private Information Retrieval (vPIR) protocols, and more generally Verifiable Linearly Homomorphic Encryption (vLHE), suffer from high client storage. VeriSimplePIR (USENIX Security 2024), the state-of-the-art vPIR protocol, requires clients to persistently maintain over 1 GiB of local storage to privately access an 8 GiB remote database. We present a new vPIR protocol that reduces the client state by orders of magnitude while preserving online latency. In our protocol, clients only need to store 512 KiB for an 8 GiB database, achieving a 2000× improvement. Our vPIR protocol is built over our new vLHE scheme. Unlike VeriSimplePIR, our scheme doesn’t use random oracles and relies only on standard lattice assumptions - (R)LWE and SIS. These improvements come at a 2.5× cost in server throughput over VeriSimplePIR. Despite this throughput overhead, we achieve a comparable online latency to VeriSimplePIR by implementing several optimizations including query-level preprocessing. We also introduce the notion of covert vPIR (cvPIR), where stateful clients enjoy full vPIR security, while even stateless clients benefit from covert security against a malicious server.

We propose Ilyazh-Web3E2E, a post-quantum hybrid messaging protocol combining classical and PQ-secure KEMs with forward secrecy and robust rekeying. The design augments the Double Ratchet model with hybrid key encapsulation (X25519 + ML-KEM), digital authentication (Ed25519 + ML-DSA), and re-encapsulation-based ratcheting for long-lived Web3 identity protection. The protocol emphasizes forward secrecy, post-compromise security, and decentralized identities. We sketch IND-CCA and AKE security arguments, present a concrete wire format, and provide comparisons with PQXDH and PQ3.

We resolve the Correlated Agreement (CA) problem for Reed-Solomon codes up to the information-theoretic capacity limit by introducing a fundamental change of basis: from the traditional evaluation domain to the syndrome space. Viewed through this “Syndrome-Space Lens,” the problem of proximity testing transforms into a transparent question of linear-algebraic geometry: a single affine line of syndromes traversing a family of low-dimensional subspaces. This new perspective makes a sharp phase transition at the capacity boundary visible, allowing for a complete characterization of the problem's behavior across all parameter regimes, yielding short, self-contained proofs.

Classification. We establish a precise trichotomy organized by the rank margin $\Delta := t-d$. At the capacity boundary ($\Delta=0$), the CA premise is information-theoretically vacuous, and we prove that no rigidity can be concluded without imposing additional structure. One step beyond capacity ($\Delta=1$), the problem enters a “knife-edge” regime where unconditional rigidity does not hold; soundness is recovered either through a combinatorial witness (such as a repeated error support or a small union of supports) or by adding protocol-level structure (such as independent two-fold MCA checks, DEEP/STIR out-of-domain sampling, or a global error locator). For stricter gaps ($\Delta\ge 2$), unconditional rigidity holds under a simple algebraic condition ($(r{+}1)k
MCA and Practical Implications. Below capacity ($\delta<1-\rho$), the strengthened mutual correlated agreement (MCA) problem reduces to ordinary correlated agreement. MCA holds under the same hypotheses as CA. When folds are generated with independent challenges (e.g., via domain-separated Fiat-Shamir), the per-round security margins add. The model-scoped soundness law is $\Pr[\mathrm{FA}] \le q^{-(\sum \Delta_i) s}$, providing a clear and complete rulebook for selecting safe and efficient parameters in FRI/STARK systems. This work bypasses the complex machinery of list-decoding algorithms entirely and resolves the long-standing open problem concerning the gap between the Johnson bound and capacity.

This work introduces a new configuration of the GSW fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) (Gentry, Sahai, Waters~Crypto 2013), with a squared gadget ,batching and scale-based homomorphic operation. This configuration offers improved efficiency compared to existing approaches. By utilizing our proposed method as the underlying building block, we can accelerate FHEW-like bootstrapping implementations, including the libraries of FHEW and TFHE. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate the concrete performance of our method, demonstrating improvements of more than 2 times faster. For example, the current ring GSW under OpenFHE takes 84 ms and TFHE takes 11.4 ms, while our approach achieves 26.2 ms and 4.8 ms, respectively. These improvements have significant implications for the practical aspects of FHE, enhancing real-world usability.

Broadcast, though often used as a black box in cryptographic protocols, is expensive to realize in terms of rounds and communication complexity. We investigate the minimal use of broadcast in round-optimal information-theoretic MPC, with statistical security. For information-theoretic MPC with guaranteed output delivery, four rounds of communication are necessary and sufficient (Applebaum, Kachlon and Patra, FOCS 2020; Applebaum, Kachlon and Patra, STOC 2023). We show that broadcast is unavoidable in the second and third rounds of statistical MPC protocols. To complement our lower bounds, we modify the protocol of Applebaum, Kachlon and Patra (STOC 2023) to make use of broadcast only in the second and third round. Along the way, we show that the sharing phase of any three-round information-theoretic VSS protocol must also make use of broadcast in the second and third rounds.

zkVot is a client side trustless distributed computation protocol that utilizes zero knowledge proving technology. It is designed to achieve anonymous and censorship resistant voting while ensuring scalability. The protocol is created as an example of how modular and distributed computation can improve both the decentralization and the scalability of the internet. A complete and working implementation of this paper is available on https://github.com/node101-io/zkvot. It is important to emphasize that zkVot is one of the first complete implementations of a fully censorship resistant anonymous voting application that can scale up to a meaningful number of voters.

This manuscript introduces Semantic Holder (SH), the opposability primitive within the Chaotic Affine Secure Hash (CASH) toolkit, completing the framework’s implementation of the Q2CSI philosophy. SH enables legally opposable interpretations through algebraic extraction from polynomial iteration traces, working in concert with CEE (confidentiality) and AOW (reliability). Building upon the Affine Iterated Inversion Problem (AIIP) foundation, SH provides mathematically verifiable legal interpretations with guaranteed minimum opposability bounds. We establish that SH maintains an opposability score Ω ≥ 0.60 through rigorous entropy preservation, institutional explainability, and legal contestability guarantees. The primitive features efficient STARK-proof verifiable computation, cross-jurisdictional compatibility, and quantum resistance through its reduction to AIIP hardness. We demonstrate practical applications in legal smart contracts, regulatory compliance auditing, and digital evidence authentication, providing concrete parameter recommendations for standard security levels. SH represents a significant advancement in cryptographic systems that must operate within legal constraints, enabling transparent and verifiable legal opposability without compromising security or performance.

Despite several known idiosyncrasies separating the synchronous and the asynchronous models, asynchronous secure multi-party computation (MPC) protocols demonstrate high-level similarities to synchronous MPC, both in design philosophy and abstract structure. As such, a coveted, albeit elusive, desideratum is to devise automatic translators (e.g., protocol compilers) of feasibility and efficiency results from one model to the other.

In this work, we demonstrate new challenges associated with this goal. Specifically, we study the case of parallel composition in the asynchronous setting. We provide formal definitions of this composition operation in the UC framework, which, somewhat surprisingly, have been missing from the literature. Using these definitions, we then turn to charting the feasibility landscape of asynchronous parallel composition.

We first prove strong impossibility results for composition operators that do not assume knowledge of the functions and/or the protocols that are being composed. These results draw a grim feasibility picture, which is in sharp contrast with the synchronous model, and highlight the question:

Is asynchronous parallel composition even a realistic goal?

To answer the above (in the affirmative), we provide conditions on the composed protocols that enable a useful form of asynchronous parallel composition, as it turns out to be common in existing constructions.

In 1997, Kani proved Kani's lemma, which asserts that a commutative diagram of four $g$‑dimensional abelian varieties induces an isogeny between product abelian varieties of dimension $2g$, in counting the number of genus-$2$ curves admitting two distinct elliptic subcovers. In these years, Kani’s lemma plays a fundamental role in isogeny-based cryptography: Kani’s lemma has found numerous cryptographic applications, including both cryptanalysis and protocol construction. However, direct investigation into the lemma itself remains scarce.

In this work, we propose a generalization of Kani’s lemma. We present a novel formulation that, given a commutative diagram of $2^{n+1}$ abelian varieties of dimension $g$, yields an isogeny of dimension $2^{n}g$. We further establish a connection between this generalized lemma and the theory of Clifford algebras, using the latter as a foundational tool in our construction. To exemplify our framework, we explicitly construct the resulting $2^{n}g$‑dimensional isogenies for the cases $n=1,2,3$. The cases of $n=2,3$ provide nontrivial generalizations of the original Kani's lemma. This generalization is expected to have novel applications in the fields of both mathematics and cryptography.