IACR News
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Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:
20 June 2025
William J Buchanan, Jamie Gilchrist, Zakwan Jaroucheh, Dmitri Timosenko, Nanik Ramchandani, Ciara Mitchell, Hisham Ali
Haoyu Wei, Jingyu Ke, Ruibang Liu, Guoqiang Li
Vojtech Suchanek, Marek Sys, Lukasz Chmielewski
As part of our work, we analyze the performance of 3-dimensional lattice reduction algorithms, which are critical for multi-scalar decompositions. To identify the most efficient approach, we experimentally compare Semaev’s algorithm --- known for its best asymptotic complexity --- with the simpler Lagrange’s algorithm. Our results reveal that, despite its simplicity, Lagrange’s algorithm is nearly twice as fast as Semaev’s in practice.
Lorenzo Rovida, Alberto Leporati, Simone Basile
In particular, we drastically reduce the upper bound on the depth of the circuits from 65 to 20, making our circuits usable in relatively small rings such as $N=2^{16}$, even for sorting values while preserving up to three decimal places. As an example, our circuit sorts 128 values with duplicates in roughly 20 seconds on a laptop, using roughly 1 GB of memory, maintaining a precision of 0.01. Furthermore, we propose an implementation of a swap-based bitonic network that is not based on approximations of the sgn$(x)$ function, which scales linearly with the number of values, useful when the number of available slots is small.
Yang Yang, Fangguo Zhang
Avik Chakraborti, Mridul Nandi, Suprita Talnikar
Sanjam Garg, Aarushi Goel, Dimitris Kolonelos, Rohit Sinha
We propose a novel framework for smart contracts that ensures {\em doubly private} execution, addressing {both on-chain and off-chain privacy} requirements. In our framework, clients submit their requests in a privacy-preserving manner to a group of (potentially mutually untrusting) servers. These servers collaboratively match client requests without learning any information about the data or identities of the clients.
We then present {\em Jigsaw}, an efficient cryptographic realization of our proposed framework. {\em Jigsaw} builds on the ZEXE architecture (Bowe et al., S\&P 2020), which leverages zkSNARKs, and extends Collaborative zkSNARKs (Ozdemir and Boneh, USENIX 2022) to enable proof generation by a group of servers.
In Jigsaw, we introduce a novel collaborative zkSNARK construction that achieves low latency and reduced proving time, and showcase these advantages over sample applications ranging from trading in a decentralized exchange to auctions and voting. Our experiments demonstrate that {\em Jigsaw} is roughly $40-50$x faster in proof generation and uses orders-of-magnitude less bandwidth than the naive approach of using off-the-shelf Collaborative zkSNARKs.
19 June 2025
Zibo Zhou, Zongyang Zhang, Feng Hao, Bowen Zheng, Zulkarnaim Masyhur
In this paper, we propose QV Network (QV-net), the first decentralized quadratic voting scheme, in which voters do not need to trust any third party other than themselves for ballot secrecy. QV-net is self-tallying with maximal ballot secrecy. Self-tallying allows anyone to compute election results once all ballots are cast. Maximal ballot secrecy ensures that what each voter learns from QV-net is nothing more than the tally and their own ballot. We provide an open-source implementation of QV-net to demonstrate its practicality based on real-world DAO voting settings, reporting only a few milliseconds for voting and a maximum of 255 milliseconds for tallying.
The exceptional efficiency of QV-net is attributed to the design of two new Zero-Knowledge Argument of Knowledge (ZKAoK) protocols for QV ballot secrecy and integrity. Previous works generally rely on pairing-friendly curves to prove the well-formedness of an encrypted QV ballot. But they incur heavy computation and large data sizes. We tackle the challenges of appropriately formalizing and proving ZKAoK relations for QV without using these curves. Specifically, we develop a succinct ZKAoK to prove a new relation: the sum of squares of a private vector's components equals a private scalar. We also introduce the first aggregated range proof to prove that values committed under different keys fall within their respective ranges. Together, these two new zero-knowledge protocols enable us to build an efficient decentralized QV scheme and are of independent interest.
Callum London, Daniel Gardham, Constantin Catalin Dragan
Rick Weber, Ryan Orendorff, Ghada Almashaqbeh, Ravital Solomon
In this work, we showcase how to make FHE accessible to non-expert developers while retaining the performance provided by an expert-level implementation. We introduce Parasol, a novel end-to-end compiler encompassing a virtual processor with a custom Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and a low-level library that implements FHE operations. Our processor integrates with existing compiler toolchains, thereby providing mainstream language support. We extract parallelism at multiple levels via our processor design and its computing paradigm. Specifically, we champion a Circuit Bootstrapping (CBS)-based paradigm, enabling efficient FHE circuit composition with multiplexers. Furthermore, Parasol’s underlying design highlights the benefits of expressing FHE computations at a higher level—producing highly compact program representations. Our experiments demonstrate the superiority of Parasol, in terms of runtime (up to 17x faster), program size (up to 22x smaller), and compile time (up to 32x shorter) compared to the current state-of-the-art. We expect the FHE computing paradigm underlying Parasol to attract future interest since it exposes added parallelism for FHE accelerators to exploit.
Lars Ran
In this work, we propose a new key-recovery attack on UOV in characteristic 2 that makes use of this property. We consider the polar forms of the UOV public maps as elements of the exterior algebra. We show that these are contained in a certain subspace of the second exterior power that is dependent on the oil space. This allows us to define relations between the polar forms and the image of the dual of the oil space under the Plücker embedding. With this, we can recover the secret oil space using sparse linear algebra.
This new attack has an improved complexity over previous methods and reduces the security by 4, 11, and 20 bits for uov-Ip, uov-III, and uov-V, respectively. Furthermore, the attack is applicable to MAYO$_2$ and improves on the best attack by 28 bits.
Yue Chen, Ling Ren
Zhi Lu, Songfeng Lu
Zhen-Hu Ning
18 June 2025
Virtual event, Anywhere on Earth, 11 August 2025
Seoul, Korea, 12 August - 13 August 2025
COSIC, KU Leuven
Job Description : The position is funded by Flemish Research Funds (FWO). The PhD candidate will work in collaboration with the research group of Prof. Amir Moradi from University of Darmstadt. The research program is defined in a joint research project jointly funded by FWO (Belgium) and DFG (Germany). The title of the project is MatSec – Maturing Physical Security Models in Realistic Scenarios. The PIs of the project in COSIC are Dr. Svetla Nikova and Prof. Vincent Rijmen.
Security models for side-channel analysis and combined attacks for HW implementations exist, but they often make unrealistic assumptions or are inaccurate in modeling physical effects. This results in countermeasures that are either overdesigned, unnecessarily increasing the costs, or still vulnerable to attacks when deployed. The main objective of this project is to provide security models that accurately abstract attacks against cryptographically secured physical devices and that allow for the creation of efficient countermeasures on hardware guaranteeing security in practice.
We are looking for people to work on the following topics: (1) Realistic side-channel models capturing the circuit’s real behavior and achieving a balance between security and efficiency and providing improved countermeasures. (2) Security models and randomness generation: to develop procedures for constructing masked HW/SW implementations with low randomness requirements (3) Combined security models extending known fault/combined adversaries.
Specific Skills Required: For the PhD position: The candidates should hold a master’s degree in Engineering, Mathematics or Computer Science with very good grades, very good knowledge and experience with programing with C/C++ and Verilog/VHDL. Preferably to have passed courses in Cryptography and/or Computer Security.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Dr. Svetla Nikova
More information: https://www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/PhD-position_FWO-DFG.pdf
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
The Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo invites applications from qualified candidates for a 2-year position as a Cryptographic Research Architect on the Open Quantum Safe project (https://openquantumsafe.org/).
This position is available immediately in Professor Stebila’s research group. You will be working with a world-wide team of researchers and developers from academia and industry on the Open Quantum Safe project. You will have the opportunity to push the boundaries of applied post-quantum cryptography and contribute to various open-source projects. You will help integrate new post-quantum cryptographic algorithms into the liboqs open-source library, and design and implement techniques for evaluating and benchmarking these cryptographic algorithms in a variety of contexts.
The field of post-quantum cryptography is rapidly evolving, and you will need to track ongoing changes to algorithms due to peer review and advances by researchers via the the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography project forum. In addition to algorithm research, tasks cover all aspects of the software development lifecycle and include design, programming cryptographic algorithms, integrating other cryptographic implementations into the liboqs framework, integrating liboqs into 3rd party open-source projects, testing, benchmarking and documentation. You may be asked to take an ownership role in coordinating the development of various sub-component of the Open Quantum Safe project.
The appointment will be a full-time position for 2 years. The salary range is $80,000–$115,000/year and commensurate with experience.
Canadians, Canadian Permanent Residents, and those who are legally entitled to work in Canada will be given priority consideration for this position.
For more information on the position and how to apply, please see https://openquantumsafe.org/team/open-positions
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Douglas Stebila (dstebila@uwaterloo.ca)
More information: https://openquantumsafe.org/team/open-positions
CEA-List, France (Saclay or Grenoble)
[1] S. Tollec et al. μArchiIFI: Formal Modeling and Verification Strategies for Microarchitectural Fault Injections. FMCAD 2023
[2] S. Tollec et al.. Fault-Resistant Partitioning of Secure CPUs for System Co-Verification against Faults. TCHES 2024
Objectives
Your main missions will be:
- To design and extend our pre-silicon methodology and associated tools to support different secured processors. In particular, leverage the specificities of the countermeasures embedded by such secured processors to speedup analysis techniques, but also integrate in our methodology and tools post-synthesis netlist level analyses of hardware architectures.
- To participate to a project-scale experimental evaluation aiming to fill the gap between pre-silicon tools and post-silicon security evaluations.
Location Saclay (Paris area) or Grenoble.
Requirements PhD or a Masters’s Degree in Electronics or Computer Science. Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, and a solid background in any of the following fields is expected: computer architecture, programming languages, formal methods, cyber-security. Knowledge or French (spoken or written) is not required but may be helpful on a day-to-day basis.
Application Please send the following documents: CV, cover letter (in French or English), transcrpit of records
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Mathieu Jan (mathieu.jan@cea.fr) and Damien Couroussé (damien.courousse@cea.fr). Reviewing of applications will continue until the position is filled.
MuseMatrix
Fellow Responsibilities
- Design zk‑SNARK/STARK or MPC circuits to verify epidemiological data integrity and outbreak modeling
- Prototype privacy-preserving alert systems for decentralized biosurveillance
- Collaborate with peer cryptographers and cross-disciplinary fellows on open-source proof-of-concept systems
- Co-author deliverables: circuit specs, threat models, implementation evaluations
Qualifications:
- Master’s or PhD in cryptography, computer science, mathematics, or related field
- Strong programming and mathematical background
- Experience with zk frameworks (e.g., Circom, snarkjs, arkworks) or MPC is a plus
- No prior biosecurity/domain expertise required—we’ll provide domain support
-Available to work part-time alongside existing commitments
Program Structure & Benefits:
- Unpaid and part-time: built to fit around ongoing work or study
- Goal-driven: produce a self-sustaining prototype or venture by program end
- Collaborative environment: work alongside other cryptographers with mentorship from senior crypto and domain experts
- Opportunity to transition into a funded startup or project launch post-fellowship
Application Instructions:
Send us an email with a brief overview of your background and skills
Closing date for applications:
Contact: bharat@causality.network
More information: https://musematrix.xyz/