IACR News
Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:
07 February 2018
Daniel Jost, Christian Badertscher, Fabio Banfi
Ayan Mahalanobis, Vivek Mallick
Dan Boneh, Yuval Ishai, Amit Sahai, David J. Wu
This work gives the first quasi-optimal SNARG for Boolean circuit satisfiability from a concrete cryptographic assumption. Our construction takes a two-step approach. The first is an information-theoretic construction of a quasi-optimal linear multi-prover interactive proof (linear MIP) for circuit satisfiability. Then, we describe a generic cryptographic compiler that transforms our quasi-optimal linear MIP into a quasi-optimal SNARG by relying on the notion of linear-only vector encryption over rings introduced by Boneh et al. Combining these two primitives yields the first quasi-optimal SNARG based on linear-only vector encryption. Moreover, our linear MIP construction leverages a new robust circuit decomposition primitive that allows us to decompose a circuit satisfiability instance into several smaller circuit satisfiability instances. This primitive may be of independent interest.
Finally, we consider (designated-verifier) SNARGs that provide optimal succinctness for a non-negligible soundness error. Concretely, we put forward the notion of "1-bit SNARGs" that achieve soundness error 1/2 with only one bit of proof. We first show how to build 1-bit SNARGs from indistinguishability obfuscation, and then show that 1-bit SNARGs also suffice for realizing a form of witness encryption. The latter result highlights a two-way connection between the soundness of very succinct argument systems and powerful forms of encryption.
Gora Adj, Omran Ahmadi, Alfred Menezes
06 February 2018
25 March - 28 March 2019
Submission deadline: 1 March 2018
Notification: 1 May 2018
University of Birmingham, UK
Candidates are expected to have established research profiles commensurate with their career stage, as well as appropriate ability to engage with teaching, attracting research funding, and administration. The area of expertise is open within cyber security, but we particularly welcome applicants from researchers specialising in systems security or the intersection of security with AI/machine learning or HCI.
The Security and Privacy group currently consists of eleven academics and is recognised by NCSC/EPSRC as an Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research. Current members of the group are: Rami Bahsoon, Ian Batten, Tom Chothia, David Galindo, Flavio Garcia, Mihai Ordean, David Oswald, Dave Parker, Christophe Petit, Eike Ritter, Mark Ryan. The current research focus of the group includes: applied cryptography, formal methods, automotive security, hardware and embedded devices security, cloud security, electronic voting, and security and privacy for society.
Closing date for applications: 25 February 2018
Contact: Professor Mark Ryan, m.d.ryan[at]cs.bham.ac.uk
More information: http://sec.cs.bham.ac.uk/#vacancies
TU Wien, Security and Privacy Group
outstanding Ph.D. and postdoc applicants, with a particular focus on
- web security
- formal methods for security and privacy
- cryptocurrencies
- applied cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies
Outstanding candidates in other disciplines are also encouraged to apply. These positions are supported by ERC, FWF, FFG grants and internal funding.
The employment is full-time (40 hrs/week) and the salary is internationally competitive (the entry-level gross salary per year is approx. 39K for PhD students and 52K per postdoc).
Interested candidates should send
- a motivation letter
- transcript of records (for Ph.D. applicants)
- a research statement (for postdoc applicants)
- a publication list
- a curriculum vitae
- contact information for two referees
to matteo.maffei (at) tuwien.ac.at.
The first application deadline is March 1, 2018: applications received by then will receive full consideration but positions will be filled continuously also later on.
Postdoc applicants are expected to have an outstanding publication record, while Ph.D. applicants should have an excellent transcript of records.
The working language in the group is English, knowledge of German is not required.
TU Wien offers an outstanding research environment and numerous professional development opportunities. The Faculty of Informatics is the largest one in Austria and is consistently ranked
among the best in Europe. Ph.D. students have the possibility to join the LogiCS doctoral school. Vienna features a vibrant and excellence-driven research landscape, with several leading research institutes (e.g., IST, AIT, SBA, RIAT) and universities continuously establishing collaborations in various fields, including cybersecurity. Finally, Vienna has been consistently ranked by Mercer over the last years the best city for quality of life worldwide.
Closing date for applications: 1 March 2018
Contact: Matteo Maffei
More information: https://secpriv.tuwien.ac.at/thesis_and_job_opportunities/
DarkMatter
• Design, implement and deploy cryptographic algorithms covering asymmetric quantum-safe crypto covering both but not limited to: key exchange algorithms and digital signature schemes.
• Conduct research and development in lattice-based, code-based or hash-based cryptosystems.
• Perform security assessments of either crypto-primitives or cryptosystems at the theoretical and implementation level.
• Work closely with the secure communications team and other teams in the organization to design end-to-end secure communication protocols using state-of-the art and customized cryptographic algorithms and primitives.
• Be involved in the integration of developed cryptosystems within DarkMatter products
Closing date for applications: 30 April 2018
Contact: Sheila Morjaria OR Mehdi Messaoudi
More information: http://grnh.se/ur3ywb1
DarkMatter
• Design, implement and deploy cryptographic algorithms on hardware covering symmetric and asymmetric crypto covering but not limited to: post-quantum cryptosystems, block and stream ciphers.
• Conduct research and development in hardware implementation and optimization and side-channel countermeasures.
• Perform security assessments of either crypto-primitives or cryptosystems at the theoretical and implementation level.
• Work closely with the secure communications team and other teams in the organization to design end-to-end secure communication protocols using state-of-the art and customized cryptographic algorithms and primitives.
• Be involved in the integration of developed cryptosystems within DarkMatter products.
Closing date for applications: 30 July 2018
Contact: Sheila Morjaria OR Mehdi Messaoudi
More information: http://grnh.se/cb1a0l1
05 February 2018
Ran Canetti, Yilei Chen, Leonid Reyzin, Ron D. Rothblum
We construct a simple CI hash function for arbitrary sparse relations, from any symmetric encryption scheme that satisfies some natural structural properties, and in addition guarantees that key recovery attacks mounted by polynomial-time adversaries have only exponentially small success probability - even in the context of key-dependent messages (KDM). We then provide parameter settings where ElGamal encryption and Regev encryption plausibly satisfy the needed properties. Our techniques are based on those of Kalai et al., with the main contribution being substituting a statistical argument for the use of obfuscation, therefore greatly simplifying the construction and basing security on better-understood intractability assumptions.
In addition, we extend the definition of correlation intractability to handle moderately sparse relations so as to capture the properties required in proof-of-work applications (e.g. Bitcoin). We also discuss the applicability of our constructions and analyses in that regime.
Mojtaba Zaheri, Babak Sadeghiyan
In this paper, we take advantage of a similar idea and feed the SMT solver itself, by extra information provided through middle state Cube characteristics, to introduce a new method which we call SMT-based Cube Attack, and apply it to improve the success of the solver in attacking reduced-round versions of the Simeck32/64 lightweight block cipher.
We first propose a new algorithm to find cubes with most number of middle state characteristics. Then, we apply these obtained cubes and their characteristics as extra information in the SMT definition of the cryptanalysis problem, to evaluate its effectiveness. Our cryptanalysis results in a full key recovery attack by 64 plaintext/ciphertext pairs on 12 rounds of the cipher in just 122.17 seconds. This is the first practical attack so far presented against the reduced-round versions of Simeck32/64.
We also conduct the cube attack on the Simeck32/64 to compare with the SMT-based cube attack. The results indicate that the proposed attack is more powerful than the cube attack.
Tuyet Duong, Alexander Chepurnoy, Hong-Sheng Zhou
Charanjit S. Jutla
Robert Künnemann, Deepak Garg, Michael Backes
To our knowledge, this work is the first to formalize misbehavior in the following sense: a deviation from the behaviour prescribed by the protocol that caused a security violation. We propose a definition for the case where it is known which parties deviated in which respect, and extend this definition to the case where neither these deviations are known, nor the complete trace of the protocol. We point out that, under realistic assumptions, it is impossible to determine all misbehaving parties, however, we show that completeness can be relaxed to exclude spurious causal dependencies. We demonstrate the use of our definition with two case studies, a delegation protocol with a central trusted authority, and an actual accountability protocol from the literature. In both cases, we discover accountability violations and apply our definition to the fixed protocols.
Phillip Rogaway, Yusi Zhang
Pasca Vlad-Raul, Simion Emil
02 February 2018
Nguyen Tuan Anh, Nguyen Bui Cuong
Howard M. Heys
01 February 2018
University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC)
UMBC is ranked 55 in Computer Engineering according to US News, and places 7th in the ranking of Most Innovative national universities.
Our group has a strong background in hardware security, reliability, and trust, and in particular in side-channel analysis and fault analysis attacks, IC Counterfeiting, Trojan detection, IP/IC protection, Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Crypto devices as well as testing and reliability of secure devices.
Requirements:
- M.Sc./B.Sc. in Computer Engineering or Electrical Engineering
- Solid knowledge in Hardware Description Languages (HDL)
- Solid Knowledge in VLSI and digital design
Please contact me with your CV and Statement of Purpose by February 15th.
Naghmeh Karimi, Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Baltimore, MD 21250
E-mail: nkarimi (at) umbc.edu
Web: http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~nkarimi/
Closing date for applications: 28 February 2018
Contact: Naghmeh Karimi
Pärnu, Estonia, 17 September - 19 September 2018
Submission deadline: 25 April 2018
Notification: 20 June 2018