IACR News
Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:
08 November 2017
Portland State University
Job PostingPortland State U is located in the heart of Portland, Oregon, one of America’s most dynamic cities. It gives unmatched access to career connections (e.g., Intel) and an internationally acclaimed culture scene. Recently, it’s becoming an emerging hub for IT industry and quantum computing.
A solid math background and strong interest in TCS are preferred. Suitable students from majors other than computer science (Math, Physics, Electrical Engineering etc.) are also encouraged to apply. Official deadline: March 1, 2018. However, review starts immediately upon receiving your complete application, so please start early.
More information can be found at http://fangsong.info/recruit/. Feel free to email me for any questions at: fsong (at) pdx.edu. (Please include PhD application in your subject)
Closing date for applications: 1 March 2018
Contact: Fang Song
Web: www.fangsong.info
Email: fsong (at) pdx.edu
More information: http://fangsong.info/recruit/
University of Versailles, France
Job Posting- 1 postdoctoral researcher position in the area of Fully Homomorphic Encryption and its applications;
- 1 postdoctoral researcher position in the area of Post-Quantum Cryptography.
The positions are available immediately for one year, and are renewable, based on mutual interest and availability of funding. The starting date can be arranged as convenient.
The candidates are expected to:
- have completed their PhD degree in cryptography;
- have adequate cryptography research experience demonstrated through a strong publication record.
Applications should be sent via email and should include a CV, a list of publications, a short research proposal, and contact information for one or two persons who are willing to give references.
Closing date for applications: 30 November 2017
Contact: Prof. Louis Goubin, Louis.Goubin (at) uvsq.fr
More information: http://lmv.math.cnrs.fr/equipes/crypto/
06 November 2017
Research Assistant/Associate in Security/Cryptography (ERC Starting Grant Confidentiality-Preserving
Newcastle University
Job PostingComputing
Newcastle upon Tyne
Salary: £27,285 to £28,936 (without PhD awarded)
£29,799 to £38,833 (PhD Awarded/Equivalent substantial research experience)
Closing Date: 05 December 2017
CASCAde (Confidentiality-Preserving Security Assurance) is an ambitious project to establish the capacity to certify complex data structures and system topologies, such that their security properties can be proven in zero-knowledge. It involves a team of cryptography, system security and usable security researchers.
As part of CASCAde, the group is seeking a researcher either with PhD awarded or a PhD thesis about to be submitted to investigate novel digital signatures on graph data structures and the certification of system topologies for subsequent proofs of knowledge.
The post is available fixed term for 3 years and is full time.
Click here for further details
For informal enquiries, please email Thomas.gross (at) ncl.ac.uk
The University holds a silver Athena SWAN award in recognition of our good employment practices for the advancement of gender equality, and the University holds the HR Excellence in Research award for our work to support the career development of our researchers. We are also a member of the Euraxess network.
Please be advised that due to a new minimum salary threshold of £30,000 per annum imposed by the UKVI, this post may not qualify for University sponsorship under Tier 2 of the points based system.
Closing date for applications: 5 December 2017
Contact: Dr Thomas Gross
Thomas.gross (at) ncl.ac.uk
More information: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/vacancies/
University of Flensburg
Job PostingPhD candidates ideally have finished (around January 2018) a masters’ degree in computer science, mathematics or electronic engineering. A background in cryptography is a plus. PostDocs should have a proven track record suitable for the position.
Please send your CV with a covering letter. PostDocs are asked to add two letters of recommendation. The positions are vacant until they are filled.
Closing date for applications: 1 February 2018
Contact: Prof. Dr. Sebastian Gajek
Flensburg University of Applied Sciences
IT Security and Cryptography
Kanzleistr. 91 - 93
24939 Flensburg, Germany
sebastian.gajek (at) hs-flensburg.de
More information: https://www.itsc.inf.hs-flensburg.de
05 November 2017
University of Waterloo
Job PostingThe University of Waterloo respects, appreciates and encourages diversity and is committed to accessibility for persons with disabilities. We welcome applications from all qualified individuals including women, members of visible minorities, Aboriginal peoples and persons with disabilities. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadian citizens and permanent residents will be given priority in the recruitment process.
Closing date for applications: 1 December 2017
Contact:
Jochen Koenemann
Chair, Department of Combinatorics and Optimization
University of Waterloo
combopt (at) uwaterloo.ca
More information: https://uwaterloo.ca/combinatorics-and-optimization/career-opportunities
03 November 2017
University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada
Job PostingClosing date for applications: 15 December 2017
More information: https://www.uvic.ca/engineering/computerscience/assets/docs/employment/CSC-Faculty-Posting-ResearchTrack-final2.pdf
COSIC KU Leuven
Job PostingStrong background in mathematics and preferably experience with implementing advanced mathematical structures in C or C++. For the postdoc researcher experience or interests in working on MPC or machine learning on private data would be an advantage.
Closing date for applications: 30 March 2018
Contact: For enquries contact nigel.paul.smart (at) gmail.com
To apply email jobs-cosic (at) esat.kuleuven.be with the documents detailed in the link below
More information: https://www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Open_Position_secure_computation.pdf
02 November 2017
Marshall Ball, Dana Dachman-Soled, Mukul Kulkarni, Tal Malkin
ePrint ReportWe instantiate our scheme in a variety of contexts, yielding efficient, non-malleable codes (NMC) against the following tampering classes:
1. Computational NMC against AC0 tampering, in the CRS model, assuming a PKE scheme with decryption in AC0 and NIZK.
2. Computational NMC against bounded-depth decision trees (of depth $t^\epsilon$, where $t$ is the number of input variables and constant $0<\epsilon<1$), in the CRS model and under the same computational assumptions as above.
3. Information theoretic NMC (with no CRS) against a streaming, space-bounded adversary, namely an adversary modeled as a read-once branching program with bounded width.
Ours are the first constructions that achieve each of the above in an efficient way, under the standard notion of non-malleability.
31 October 2017
Raphael Bost, Pierre-Alain Fouque
ePrint ReportLijing Zhou, Licheng Wang, Yiru Sun
ePrint ReportZhengzhong Jin, Yunlei Zhao
ePrint ReportWe then design and analyze both general and highly practical KC and AKC schemes, which are referred to as OKCN and AKCN respectively for presentation simplicity. Based on KC and AKC, we present generic constructions of key exchange (KE) from LWR, LWE, RLWE and MLWE. The generic construction allows versatile instantiations with our OKCN and AKCN schemes, for which we elaborate on evaluating and choosing the concrete parameters in order to achieve a well-balanced performance among security, computational cost, bandwidth efficiency, error rate, and operation simplicity.
Joppe W. Bos, Peter L. Montgomery
ePrint ReportShai Halevi, Carmit Hazay, Antigoni Polychroniadou, Muthuramakrishnan Venkitasubramaniam
ePrint ReportIn this work, we resolve this question by designing a 4-round actively secure multi-party (two or more parties) protocol for general functionalities under standard polynomial-time hardness assumptions.
Luca Mariot, Stjepan Picek, Alberto Leporati, Domagoj Jakobovic
ePrint ReportSeyed Farhad Aghili, Hamid Mala
ePrint ReportGilles Barthe, François Dupressoir, Benjamin Grégoire
ePrint ReportWe disprove their first claim by exhibiting a first order flaw that is present in their first proposed algorithm scheme at all orders.
We put their second claim into question by showing that their proposed algorithm, as published, is not well-defined at all orders, making use of variables before defining them. We then also exhibit a counterexample at order 2, that we believe generalises to all even orders.
Charles V. Wright, David Pouliot
ePrint ReportIn this paper, we argue in favor of an analytical approach for quantifying the vulnerability of leaky cryptographic constructions against attacks that use leakage to recover the plaintext or other sensitive information. In contrast to the previous empirical and ad-hoc approach for identifying and assessing such vulnerabilities, analytical techniques can be integrated much earlier in the design lifecycle of a new construction, and the results of the analysis apply much more broadly across many different kinds of data.
We applied the proposed framework to evaluate the leakage profiles of five recent constructions for deterministic and order-revealing encryption. Our analysis discovered powerful attacks against every construction that we analyzed, and with only one possible exception, the attack allows the adversary to recover virtually any plaintext with only an exponentially small probability of error. We hope that these results, together with the proposed analytical framework, will help spur the development of new efficient constructions with improved leakage profiles that meaningfully limit the power of leakage abuse attacks in the real world.
Xinping Zhou, Carolyn Whitnall, Elisabeth Oswald, Degang Sun, Zhu Wang
ePrint ReportSean Bowe, Ariel Gabizon, Ian Miers
ePrint ReportOur primary contribution is a more scalable multi-party computation (MPC) protocol, secure in the random beacon model, which omits the precommitment round. We show that security holds even if an adversary has limited influence on the beacon. Next, we apply our main result to obtain a two-round protocol for computing an extended version of the CRS of Groth's SNARK. We show that knowledge soundness is maintained in the generic group model when using this CRS.
We also contribute a more secure pairing-friendly elliptic curve construction and implementation, tuned for use in zk-SNARKs, in light of recent optimizations to the Number Field Sieve algorithm which reduced the security estimates of existing pairing-friendly curves used in zk-SNARK applications.