International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Postdoctoral Research Position at Shaoxing University Annual Salary: 300,000 RMB Requirements: Candidates must have a background in cybersecurity and smart cities. Submit 3 recent first-authored papers (not from special issues). Include a brief CV. Application: Email applications only to [email protected]. Shortlisted candidates will be notified for further steps. Subject Line: Postdoc Application – Cybersecurity and Smart Cities

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Mehdi Gheisari

We are looking for a motivated and talented PhD student with a passion for reinforcement learning and cybersecurity. Your main objectives will be to contribute to realistic cybersecurity benchmarks and simulators for the RL research community, develop state-of-the-art algorithms that adapt to changing threats, incorporate user models, and provide tangible performance assurance. You will investigate how to represent network environments, implement multi-agent or single-agent RL approaches, and evaluate them using realistic scenarios. Your research may have a direct real societal impact by helping to protect critical infrastructure and everyday technology users. Requirements - M.Sc. degree (completed or near completion) in Computer Science, Cyber Security, Artificial Intelligence, or a related field. - Demonstrated interest and experience (e.g., via projects, code, or publications) in reinforcement learning and/or cybersecurity. - Experience with programming (e.g., in Python, C/C++, or similar) - Proficiency in English (oral and written). - Excellent communication and collaboration skills. Are you interested in this exciting position but still have questions? Feel free to contact Dr. Ashish Sai at [email protected] or Dr. Dennis Soemers at [email protected].

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Dr. Ashish Sai ([email protected]).

More information: https://vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastricht-PhD-in-Adaptive-AI-Defense-Reinforcement-Learning-for-Cybersecurity/818657402/

Confidential Inference and Explainability: Toward Self-Diagnosis via Imaging

This PhD topic aims to jointly address privacy and explainability of decisions obtained through image analysis using a neural network. In the context of a classification task performed on a remote server, the goal is to develop approaches that ensure the confidentiality of the explanation as well as that of the input (and output) data. Preserving the privacy of data while ensuring the transparency of the model is a crucial challenge, particularly in domains such as healthcare. The objective aligns with the emerging regulatory framework on AI at the European level (AI Act). While these issues are the subject of significant research individually - whether in applied cryptography or machine learning - the combination of explainability under privacy constraints represents a new research problem. The project will seek to identify local explainability methods based on visual information or concepts that can be adapted to a privacy-preserving mode. Confidentiality may be approached through secure multi-party computation and/or homomorphic encryption. Thanks to a collaboration with the Saint-Etienne University Hospital (France), it will be possible to fine-tune the secure AI system and conduct supervised experiments on health data, aimed at enabling self-diagnosis. The experimentation may also extend to ethical and legal dimensions, through a partnership with the University of Ottawa.

PhD Location: Laboratoire Hubert Curien (LabHC), Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Etienne, France (regular meetings at the CITI Laboratory, INSA Lyon, Villeurbanne, France).

Starting date: 01/10/2025.

Expected profile: Candidates holding a degree from an engineering school or a Master 2 from a university in applied mathematics or computer science, with training in cryptography and machine learning, and proficiency in a programming language and one or more reference development libraries in one of these fields.

Send your CV, cover letter and master transcripts and give contact details of referees by 25/05/2025.

Closing date for applications:

Contact:

Thierry Fournel (LabHC, fournel(at)univ-st-etienne.fr), Clémentine Gritti (CITI, Inria, clementine.gritti(at)insa-lyon.fr) and Amaury Habrard (LabHC, Inria, amaury.habrard(at)univ-st-etienne.fr)

Authenticity-oriented (previously named as privacy-free) garbling schemes of Frederiksen et al. Eurocrypt ’15 are designed to satisfy only the authenticity criterion of Bellare et al. ACM CCS ’12, and to be more efficient compared to full-fledged garbling schemes. In this work, we improve the state-of-the-art authenticity-oriented version of half gates (HG) garbling of Zahur et al. Crypto ’15 by allowing it to be bandwidth-free if any of the input wires of an AND gate is freely settable by the garbler. Our full solution AuthOr then successfully combines the ideas from information-theoretical garbling of Kondi and Patra Crypto ’17 and the HG garbling-based scheme that we obtained. AuthOr has a lower communication cost (i.e. garbled circuit or GC size) than HG garbling without any further security assumption. Theoretically, AuthOr’s GC size reduction over HG garbling lies in the range between 0 to 100%, and the exact improvement depends on the circuit structure. We have implemented our scheme and conducted tests on various circuits that are constructed by independent researchers. Our experimental results show that in practice, the GC size gain may be up to roughly 98%.

We propose BLASter, a proof of concept LLL implementation that demonstrates the practicality of multiple theoretical improvements. The implementation uses the segmentation strategy from Neumaier–Stehlé (ISSAC 2016), parallelism and Seysen's reduction that was proposed by Kirchner–Espitau–Fouque (CRYPTO 2021) and implemented in OptLLL, and the BLAS library for linear algebra operations. It consists of only 1000 significant lines of C++ and Python code, and is made publicly available.

For q-ary lattices that fplll can handle without multiprecision (dimension <180), BLASter is considerably faster than fplll, OptLLL and Ryan–Heninger's flatter (CRYPTO 2023), without degrading output reduction quality. Thanks to Seysen's reduction it can further handle larger dimension without resorting to multiprecision, making it more than 10x faster than flatter and OptLLL, and 100x faster than fplll in dimensions 256 to 1024.

It further includes segmented BKZ and segmented deep-LLL variants. The latter provides bases as good as BKZ-15 and has a runtime that is only a couple of times more than our LLL baseline.

This remains a proof of concept: the effective use of higher precision — which is needed to handle \(\textit{all}\) lattices — has further obstacles and is left for future work. Still, this work contains many lessons learned, and is meant to motivate and guide the development of a robust and modern lattice reduction library, which shall be much faster than fplll.

At CANS 2024, Zbudila et al. presented MaSTer, a maliciously secure multi-party computation protocol for truncation. It allows adversaries to manipulate outputs with a bounded additive error while avoiding detection with a certain probability. In this work, we analyse the broader implications of adversarial exploitation in probabilistic truncation protocols, specifically in relation to MaSTer. We propose three attack strategies aimed at inducing misclassification in deep neural network (DNN) inference. Our empirical evaluation across multiple datasets demonstrates that while adversarial influence remains negligible under realistic constraints, certain configurations and network architectures exhibit increased vulnerability. By improving the understanding of the risks associated with probabilistic truncation protocols in privacy-preserving machine learning, our work demonstrates that the MaSTer protocol is robust in realistic settings.

Generic Secure Multiparty Computation (Generic MPC) recently received much attraction in the blockchain realm as it allows mutually distrustful parties to jointly compute a global function using their private inputs while keeping them private; and more so; the expression of the function can be done in a programmable manner (hence `generic'); as opposed to the first rising star cryptographic technique Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) which only allows computation on private input of a single party (via the `commit-and-prove' approach). While ZKP, by nature, allows public verifiability, Generic MPC is not so: Generic MPC mostly focuses on Malicious Security in which the computing result is verifiable only among the computing parties. Yet, in the blockchain realm, public verifiability is important, as the consensus protocol is not just among the computing parties but also external servers. A few works were done to bridge this gap (albeit not in the blockchain realm), i.e., Public Auditable MPC. Public Audtitability is a stronger property than Public Verifiability: the first one certifies the computation done in the MPC, while the latter certifies only the relation between the outputs and the inputs. However, they are non-constant round protocols and only for Secret-Sharing-based MPC, i.e., round complexity scales linearly with the circuit multiplicative depth, while round latency is an important cost metric in the blockchain domain. We address this problem by providing a Public Auditable Garbled Circuit protocol that is maliciously secure, publicly auditable, and constant-round. Our protocol is efficient, with only minimal overhead in terms of round, communication, and public transcript size.

Differential Fault Attacks (DFAs) have recently emerged as a significant threat against stream ciphers specifically designed for Hybrid Homomorphic Encryption (HHE). In this work, we propose DFAs on the $\textsf{FRAST}$ cipher, which is a cipher specifically tailored for Torus-based Fully Homomorphic Encryption (TFHE). The round function of $\textsf{FRAST}$ employs random S-boxes to minimize the number of rounds, and can be efficiently evaluated in TFHE. With our specific key recovery strategy, we can mount the DFA with a few faults. Under the assumption of precise fault injection, our DFA can recover the key within one second using just 4 or 6 faults. When discarding the assumption and considering a more practical fault model, we can still achieve key recovery in a few minutes without increasing the number of faults. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first third-party cryptanalysis on $\textsf{FRAST}$. We also explored countermeasures to protect $\textsf{FRAST}$. Our analysis revealed that negacyclic S-boxes, a key component of TFHE-friendly ciphers, are unsuitable for incorporating linear structures to resist DFA. Consequently, we recommend removing the negacyclic restriction in the penultimate round of FRAST and introducing non-zero linear structures into the S-boxes of the last two rounds. We believe that our work will provide valuable insights for the design of TFHE-friendly ciphers.

Homomorphic Encryption (HE) allows computations on encrypted data without decryption. It can be used where the users’ information are to be processed by an untrustful server, and has been a popular choice in privacy-preserving applica- tions. However, in order to obtain meaningful results, we have to assume an honest-but-curious server, i.e., it will faithfully follow what was asked to do. If the server is malicious, there is no guarantee that the computed result is correct. The notion of verifiable HE (vHE) is introduced to detect malicious server’s behaviors, but current vHE schemes are either more than four orders of magnitude slower than the underlying HE operations (Atapoor et. al, CIC 2024) or fast but incompatible with server- side private inputs (Chatel et. al, CCS 2024).

In this work, we propose a vHE framework ZHE: effi- cient Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) that prove the correct execution of HE evaluations while protecting the server’s private inputs. More precisely, we first design two new highly- efficient ZKPs for modulo operations and (Inverse) Number Theoretic Transforms (NTTs), two of the basic operations of HE evaluations. Then we build a customized ZKP for HE evaluations, which is scalable, enjoys a fast prover time and has a non-interactive online phase. Our ZKP is applicable to all Ring-LWE based HE schemes, such as BGV and CKKS. Finally, we implement our protocols for both BGV and CKKS and conduct extensive experiments on various HE workloads. Compared to the state-of-the-art works, both of our prover time and verifier time are improved; especially, our prover cost is only roughly 27-36× more expensive than the underlying HE operations, this is two to three orders of magnitude cheaper than state-of-the-arts.

We study the problem of how to find the inverse of shift invariant (SI) transformations proposed in Daemen's thesis. In particular, two of them have been used in practice: $y_i=x_i\oplus \overline{x_{i+1}}x_{i+2}$ and $y_i=x_i\oplus \overline{x_{i+1}}x_{i+2}x_{i+3}$. The first one is the well-known $\chi$ transformation used in \textsf{SHA-3}, \textsf{Subterranean 2.0} and \textsf{Rasta}, while the second one is used in a recently proposed ZK-friendly hash function called Monolith. While the concrete formula of the inverse of $\chi$ of arbitrary size has been given and proved by Liu et al. at JoC 2022, it remains unknown how to deduce such a formula and how to systematically study other SI transformations. In this work, we aim to provide a general method and flow to find the inverse of SI transformations, though it is still limited to some specific types and it may not work for all such transformations. However, such a general method does shed new insight on how to find their inverse, as we can apply this method to several different SI transformations, including the one used in Monolith. We expect that this method can be further generalized and applied to more SI transformations.

Lattices are the basis of most NIST-recommended post-quantum cryptography (PQC) schemes, required to thwart the threat posed by the eventual construction of large-scale quantum computers. At the same time, lattices enable more advanced cryptographic constructions, such as fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), which is increasingly used for privacy-preserving applications like machine learning. This work delves into the efficiency and trade-off assessment of polynomial multiplication algorithms and their applications to PQC, FHE, and other schemes. Such algorithms are at the core of lattice-based cryptography and may become a critical bottleneck when deploying PQC- and FHE-based solutions on resource-constrained devices. We propose a formal analysis of so-called incompleteness in the Number Theoretic Transform (NTT). Although this concept is not new, our systematization shows how to optimize polynomial multiplication in quotient rings, considering factors such as the degree of incompleteness, the associated prime moduli, constraints of the target platform, and target security level. Besides efficiency, we formally show that the systematized family of incomplete NTT variants supports a larger set of prime moduli. This property enables new trade-offs for algorithms like the FIPS-approved module-lattice-based key encapsulation mechanism (ML-KEM) and faster amortized bootstrapping in FHE schemes. Our results include shorter ciphertexts in ML-KEM with only a modest hit in performance and a 6-42% performance boost in the NTT computation of a state-of-the-art FHE solution.

In recent years, online anonymity has become increasingly important but is under threat due to the challenges of moderating anonymous spaces. A promising cryptographic solution, known as anonymous blocklisting, allows users to post anonymously while still enabling moderation. Moderation via anonymous blocklisting roughly works by requiring that when users post a message they attach a cryptographic proof that they did not author any posts on a “blocklist”. Existing anonymous blocklisting schemes are unfortunately still far from achieving practical performance for large blocklists. This is essentially due to all prior works requiring a user to (cryptographically) reprocess blocklist entries many times. Relatedly, prior works have relatively high verification times and proof sizes. In this work, we introduce ALPACA, the first anonymous blocklisting system with the property that a user only needs to do a constant amount of work per blocklist entry. Thus, our scheme has asymptotically optimal performance. Our scheme is also the first to have verification times and proof sizes that are independent of the number of blocklist entries. Our key technique is a new variant of incrementally verifiable computation (IVC), designed to ensure anonymity. Along the way, we introduce new definitions to formally establish security. On a mid-range laptop, ALPACA’s proof generation time is always 6.15 seconds and proof size is 25.6KBs. On a server, the verification time is always 400ms.

We present conceptually simple constructions of verifiable random functions (VRF) that fulfill strong notions of unbiasability recently introduced by Giunta and Stewart [EC:GS24]. VRFs with such strong properties were previously only known in the random oracle model or from the decisional Diffie–Hellman assumption with preprocessing. In contrast, our constructions are based on generic assumptions and are thus the first to be plausibly post-quantum secure. Moreover, our constructions fulfill several additional properties such as: • If the underlying VRF is aggregate, key-homomorphic or computable in \(\mathsf{NC}^1\), then so is our VRF. • For any verification key, the VRF output has almost the same min-entropy as the VRF input. Lastly, we outline a path towards a lattice-based VRF (without setup).

Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) is a cornerstone technology in privacy-preserving computing, addressing critical challenges in domains such as finance and healthcare by ensuring data confidentiality during computation. However, the high computational overhead of ZKP, particularly in proof generation and verification, limits its scalability and usability in real-world applications. Existing efforts to accelerate ZKP primarily focus on specific components, such as polynomial commitment schemes or elliptic curve operations, but fail to deliver an integrated, flexible, and efficient end-to-end solution that includes witness generation.

In this work, we present ZKPoG, a GPU-based ZKP acceleration platform that achieves full end-to-end optimization. ZKPoG addresses three key challenges: (1) designing a witness-generation-incorporated flow for Plonkish circuits, enabling seamless integration of frontend and backend with GPU acceleration; (2) optimizing memory usage to accommodate large-scale circuits on affordable GPUs with limited memory; and (3) introducing an automated compiler for custom gates, simplifying adaptation to diverse applications. Experimental results on an NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU show on average $22.8\times$ end-to-end acceleration compared to state-of-the-art CPU implementations and on average $12.7\times$ speedup over existing GPU-based approaches.

Secret sharing is a fundamental primitive in cryptography, and it can be achieved even with perfect security. However, the distribution of shares requires computational assumptions, which can compromise the overall security of the protocol. While traditional Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) can maintain security, its widespread deployment in general networks would incur prohibitive costs.

In this work, we present a quantum protocol for distributing additive secret sharing of 0, which we prove to be composably secure within the Abstract Cryptography framework. Moreover, our protocol targets the Qline, a recently proposed quantum network architecture designed to simplify and reduce the cost of quantum communication. Once the shares are distributed, they can be used to securely perform a wide range of cryptographic tasks, including standard additive secret sharing, anonymous veto, and symmetric key establishment.

We propose a new method for retrieving the algebraic structure of a generic alternant code given an arbitrary generator matrix, provided certain conditions are met. We then discuss how this challenges the security of the McEliece cryptosystem instantiated with this family of codes. The central object of our work is the quadratic hull related to a linear code, defined as the intersection of all quadrics passing through the columns of a given generator or parity-check matrix, where the columns are considered as points in the affine or projective space. The geometric properties of this object reveal important information about the internal algebraic structure of the code. This is particularly evident in the case of generalized Reed-Solomon codes, whose quadratic hull is deeply linked to a well-known algebraic variety called the rational normal curve. By utilizing the concept of Weil restriction of affine varieties, we demonstrate that the quadratic hull of a generic dual alternant code inherits many interesting features from the rational normal curve, on account of the fact that alternant codes are subfield-subcodes of generalized Reed-Solomon codes. If the rate of the generic alternant code is sufficiently high, this allows us to construct a polynomial-time algorithm for retrieving the underlying generalized Reed-Solomon code from which the alternant code is defined, which leads to an efficient key-recovery attack against the McEliece cryptosystem when instantiated with this class of codes. Finally, we discuss the generalization of this approach to Algebraic-Geometry codes and Goppa codes.

Mix networks (mixnets) offer robust anonymity even against adversaries monitoring all network links; however, they impose high latency on communications. To address this, recent research has explored strategic low-latency routing within mixnets. While these strategies appear to reduce latency, their impact on mixnet anonymity has not been carefully assessed, raising concerns about potential deanonymization of clients. Tackling this challenge, this paper first quantifies the anonymity loss associated with low-latency routing techniques in mixnets. Building on these insights, second, we introduce a novel low-latency routing method that maintains mixnet anonymity while achieving significant latency reductions compared to the state-of-the-art solution LARMix (NDSS, 2024). Our approach also ensures a more balanced load distribution among mixnet nodes. Moreover, under adversarial conditions where parts of the mixnet are compromised, our method does not confer significant advantages to the adversary, unlike LARMix. Thus, our proposal emerges as the optimal choice for low-latency routing in mixnets. Furthermore, we note that this version expands on both the analytical and experimental results of the previously published paper in NCA 2024, specifically through investigating the anonymity of Loopix-like mixnets.

Reverse firewalls (RFs), introduced by Mironov and Stephens Davidowitz at Eurocrypt 2015, provide a defence mechanism for cryptographic protocols against subversion attacks. In a subversion setting, an adversary compromises the machines of honest parties, enabling the leakage of their secrets through the protocol transcript. Previous research in this area has established robust guarantees, including resistance against data exfiltration for an RF. In this work, we present a new perspective focused on the implementation specifics of RFs. The inherently untrusted nature of RFs exposes their real-world implementations to the risk of Trojan insertion — an especially pressing issue in today’s outsourced supply chain ecosystem. We argue how Trojan-affected RF implementations can compromise their core exfiltration resistance property, leading to a complete breakdown of the RF’s security guarantees.

Building on this perspective, we propose an enhanced definition for ``Trojan-resilient Reverse Firewalls'' (Tr-RF), incorporating an additional Trojan resilience property. We then present concrete instantiations of Tr-RFs for Coin Tossing (CT) and Oblivious Transfer (OT) protocols, utilizing techniques from Private Circuit III (CCS'16) to convert legacy RFs into Tr-RFs. We also give simulation-based proofs to claim the enhanced security guarantees of our Tr-RF instantiations. Additionally, we offer concrete implementations of our Tr-RF based CT and OT protocols utilizing the Open-Portable Trusted Execution Environment (OP-TEE). Through OP-TEE, we practically realize assumptions made in Private Circuit III that are critical to ensuring Tr-RF security, bridging the gap between theoretical models and real-world applications. To the best of our knowledge, this provides the first practical implementation of reverse firewalls for any cryptographic functionality. Our work emphasizes the importance of evaluating protocol specifications within implementation-specific contexts.

A group signature scheme enables users of a group to anonymously sign messages on behalf of the group, while a designated authority can revoke anonymity when needed to ensure user accountability. Among group signature schemes, fully dynamic ones are particularly desirable as they allow new users to join and misbehaved existing users to be revoked without requiring system-wide updates. This paper introduces DGSP, a post-quantum fully dynamic group signature scheme that addresses key limitations of existing schemes like DGMT and SPHINX-in-the-Head (SITH). Leveraging the properties of ${\rm SPHINCS}^+$, DGSP achieves a superior balance between scalability and efficiency by (i) supporting up to $2^{60}$ users, (ii) requiring negligible setup time, and (iii) featuring efficient algorithms with short signatures of constant-size. Notably, while DGMT is limited to $2^{15}$ users, DGSP extends this to $2^{60}$ while keeping signatures compact—only 3.03 to 4.93 times larger than those of DGMT, yet just 0.021 to 0.004 times the size of SITH signatures. This makes DGSP a compelling solution for applications requiring both large-scale user support and signature efficiency in the post-quantum setting. Moreover, DGSP strengthens managerial accountability compared to DGMT by (i) enabling users to verify their certificates generated by the manager and (ii) ensuring public verifiability of the manager's signature attribution. Although SITH claims to support $2^{60}$ users, our analysis reveals that its opening algorithm is highly inefficient, making it impractical to handle such a large number of users. Our security analysis shows that DGSP achieves unforgeability, anonymity, and traceability in the standard model. We also provide a complete implementation of DGSP. Our experimental study exhibits that DGSP is superior over existing schemes in terms of efficiency and scalability.

It is a widely accepted standard practice to implement cryptographic software so that secret inputs do not influence the cycle count. Software following this paradigm is often referred to as "constant-time" software and typically involves following three rules: 1) never branch on a secret-dependent condition, 2) never access memory at a secret-dependent location, and 3) avoid variable-time arithmetic operations on secret data. The third rule requires knowledge about such variable-time arithmetic instructions, or vice versa, which operations are safe to use on secret inputs. For a long time, this knowledge was based on either documentation or microbenchmarks, but critically, there were never any guarantees for future microarchitectures. This changed with the introduction of the data-operand-independent-timing (DOIT) mode on Intel CPUs and, to some extent, the data-independent-timing (DIT) mode on Arm CPUs. Both Intel and Arm document a subset of their respective instruction sets that are intended to leak no information about their inputs through timing, even on future microarchitectures if the CPU is set to run in a dedicated DOIT (or DIT) mode. In this paper, we present a principled solution that leverages DOIT to enable cryptographic software that is future-proof constant-time, in the sense that it ensures that only instructions from the DOIT subset are used to operate on secret data, even during speculative execution after a mispredicted branch or function return location. For this solution, we build on top of existing security type systems in the Jasmin framework for high-assurance cryptography. We then use our solution to evaluate the extent to which existing cryptographic software built to be "constant-time" is already secure in this stricter paradigm implied by DOIT and what the performance impact is to move from constant-time to future-proof constant-time.