International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Private BitTorrent trackers enforce upload-to-download ratios to prevent free-riding, but suffer from three critical weaknesses: reputation cannot move between trackers, centralized servers create single points of failure, and upload statistics are self-reported and unverifiable. When a tracker shuts down (whether by operator choice, technical failure, or legal action) users lose their contribution history and cannot prove their standing to new communities. We address these problems by storing reputation in smart contracts and replacing self-reports with cryptographic attestations. Receiving peers sign receipts for transferred pieces, which the tracker aggregates and verifies before updating on-chain reputation. Trackers run in Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to guarantee correct aggregation and prevent manipulation of state. If a tracker is unavailable, peers use an authenticated Distributed Hash Table (DHT) for discovery: the on-chain reputation acts as a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), so peers can verify each other and maintain access control without the tracker. This design persists reputation across tracker failures and makes it portable to new instances through single-hop migration in factory-deployed contracts. We formalize the security requirements, prove correctness under standard cryptographic assumptions, and evaluate a prototype on Intel TDX. Measurements show that transfer receipts adds less than 6\% overhead with typical piece sizes, and signature aggregation speeds up verification by $2.5\times$.

The study of cryptographic criteria for Boolean functions with restricted domains has been an important topic over the last 20 years. A revived interest has sparked after the work of Carlet, Méaux and Rotella in 2017, where the authors studied cryptographic properties of restricted-domain functions and introduced the concept of weightwise perfectly balanced functions as part of the analysis of the FLIP stream cipher. Weightwise (almost) perfectly balanced functions are defined as Boolean functions that are (almost) balanced on each of the sets of vectors of the same Hamming weight. Several approaches have been considered to build new families of such functions. In this article, we present some new constructions of weightwise (almost) perfectly balanced functions via two approaches, the first class is constructed using the $t$-concatenation of Boolean functions, whereas the second one draws certain functions from the so-called general Maiorana-McFarland class. A generic analysis of these two classes is given, as well as explicit examples in both classes. Namely, we provide instances of functions in both classes attaining high overall nonlinearities, as well as slice nonlinearities. Notably, we present examples in 16 variables that attain some of the best overall nonlinearities, and more importantly, the highest slice nonlinearities among all of the constructions presented in the literature.

We analyse the binding properties of explicitly-rejecting key-encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) obtained by the Fujisaki-Okamoto (FO) transform. The framework for binding notions, introduced by [CDM24], generalises robustness and collision-freeness, and was motivated by the discovery of new types of attacks against KEMs. Implicitly-rejecting FO-KEMs have already been analysed with regards to the binding notions, with [KSW25b] providing the full picture. Binding notions for explicitly-rejecting FO-KEMs have been examined only partially, leaving several gaps. Moreover, the analysis of the explicit-rejection setting must account for additional binding notions that implicitly-rejecting KEMs cannot satisfy. We give mostly positive results for the explicitly-rejecting FO transform—though many notions require further robustness assumptions on the underlying PKE. We then show that the explicit FO transform with plaintext confirmation hash (HFO) achieves all notions and requires weaker robustness assumptions. Finally, we introduce a slightly modified version of the HFO transform that achieves all binding notions without requiring any robustness of the underlying PKE.

ARX-based ciphers such as Salsa20 and ChaCha achieve high performance using only modular addition, rotation, and XOR. While ARX constructions are widely deployed in practice, linear and differential-linear cryptanalysis often reveal non-negligible biases in their reduced-round variants. Previous work has shown that a 7-round distinguisher on ChaCha is feasible, requiring about \(2^{214}\) operations and relying on a linear approximation with a theoretical bias of \(2^{-53}\). However, such theoretical approximations significantly deviate from experimental observations. In this work, we resolve these discrepancies by introducing new fundamental linear approximations for two consecutive additions over three independent variables. We rigorously derive the exact probabilities of these approximations, demonstrating that the conventional independence assumption leads to systematic errors in bias estimation. Applying our theorem to ChaCha, we refine the probabilities of key approximations used in previous attacks. Our refined estimates closely match experimentally observed biases, reducing the gap between theory and practice. These results provide a more accurate foundation for future differential-linear cryptanalysis of ChaCha and other ARX-based designs.

Traditional commit-and-reveal mechanisms have been used to realize sealed-bid on-chain auctions. However, these leak timing information, impose inefficient participation costs -- the inclusion fee to be paid for adding the transaction on-chain -- and also require multiple slots to execute the auction. Recent research investigates single-slot auctions; however, it requires a high threshold of honest parties.

We present a protocol that addresses these issues. Our design combines timestamp-based certificates with censorship resistance through inclusion lists. The resulting protocol satisfies four properties, the first being a strong hiding property which consists of Value Indistinguishability, Existential Obfuscation and User Obfuscation. This not only ensures that the adversary cannot differentiate between two value of bids (as the previously defined Hiding property does in Pranav et al. [MCP]), but also that the very existence of a bid and the identity of the bidder remain obfuscated. The second property is Short-Term Censorship Resistance, ensuring that, if the underlying blockchain outputs a block, then the auction would contain bids from all honest users. The third is a new property we introduce, Auction Participation Efficiency (APE), that measures how closely on-chain outcomes resemble classical auctions in terms of costs for participating users. And the fourth property is No Free Bid Withdrawal, which disallows committed bids from being withdrawn in case the bidder changes its mind.

Together, these properties yield a fair, private, and economically robust auction primitive that can be integrated into any blockchain to support secure and efficient auction execution.

Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) in Ethereum improves decentralization and scalability by offloading block construction to specialized builders. In practice, MEV-Boost implements PBS via a side-car protocol with trusted relays between proposers and builders, resulting in increased centralization as well as security (e.g., block stealing) and performance concerns. We propose Decentralized Proposer-as-a-Service (DPaaS), a deployable architecture that eliminates centralized relays while preserving backward compatibility with Ethereum’s existing consensus layer. Our insight is that we can reduce centralized trust by distributing the combined roles of the proposer and relay to a set of Proposer Entities (PEs), each running in independent Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). For compatibility, DPaaS presents itself to Ethereum as a single validator, leveraging threshold and aggregation properties of the BLS signature scheme used in Ethereum. At the same time, DPaaS protocols ensure fair exchange between builders and proposers even in the face of a small fraction of TEE failures or partial synchrony in networks. Our evaluation, deployed across four independent cloud hosts and driven by real-world traces, shows that DPaaS achieves less than 5 ms bid processing latency and 55.75 ms latency from the end of auction to block proposal -- demonstrating that DPaaS can offer security and decentralization benefits while providing strong performance.

Ideal functionalities are used to study increasingly complex protocols within the Universal Composability framework. However, such functionalities are often complex themselves, making it difficult to assess whether they truly fulfill their promises. In this paper, we present four attacks on functionalities from various applications (e-voting, SMPC, anonymous lotteries, and smart metering), demonstrating that they do not capture the intuitively expected properties.

We argue that ideal functionalities should not merely be justified secure at a high level but rigorously proven to be so. To this end, we propose a methodology that combines game-based proofs and computer-aided verification: ideal functionalities can in fact be treated as protocols, and one can use traditional game-based proofs to study them, where any game-based security property proven on the functionality does transfer to any protocol that realizes it. We also propose fixed versions of the ideal functionalities we studied, and formally define the security properties they should satisfy through a game. Finally, using Squirrel, a proof assistant for protocol security, we formally prove that the fixed functionalities verify the specified game-based security properties.

We present SALSAA, a more efficient and more versatile extension of the state-of-the-art lattice-based fully-succinct argument frameworks, ``RoK, paper, SISsors (RPS)'' and ``RoK and Roll (RnR)'' [Klooß, Lai, Nguyen, and Osadnik; ASIACRYPT'24, '25], integrating the sumcheck technique as a main component. This integration enables us to design an efficient norm-check protocol (controlling the norm during witness extraction) with a strictly linear-time prover while reducing proof sizes by 2-3$\times$ compared to the previous quasi-linear-time norm-check in RPS/RnR, eliminating a central performance bottleneck. The sumcheck integration also allows us to natively support a wider class of relations, including rank-1 constraint systems (R1CS), which are widely used to express real-world computations.

To demonstrate the versatility and efficiency of our framework, we showcase three impactful applications achieved by different RoKs (Reductions of Knowledge) compositions: (i) a lattice-based succinct argument of knowledge with a linear-time prover, achieving a verifier time of $41$ ms, prover runtime of $10.61$ s, and proof size of $979$ KB for a witness of $2^{28}$ $\mathbb{Z}_q$ elements; (ii) a polynomial commitment scheme with matching performance; and (iii) the first lattice-based folding scheme natively operating on $\ell_2$-norm-bounded witnesses, achieving highly efficient verification in $2.28$ ms and producing a proof of just $73$ KB for a witness of $2^{28}$ $\mathbf{Z}_q$ elements, outperforming prior works for the family of linear relations.

We provide a modular, concretely efficient Rust implementation of our framework, benchmarked over cyclotomic rings with AVX-512-accelerated NTT-based arithmetic, demonstrating the practical efficiency of our approach.

Anamorphic signature schemes (KPPYZ, Crypto 2023) allow users to hide encrypted messages in signatures to allow covert communication in a hypothesized scenario where encryption is outlawed by a "dictator" but authentication is permitted. We enhance the security of anamorphic signatures by proposing two parallel notions of unforgeability which close gaps in existing security definitions. The first notion considers a dictator who wishes to forge anamorphic signatures. This notion patches a divide between the definition and a stated security goal of robustness (BGHMR, Eurocrypt 2024). We port two related BGHMR constructions to the signature scheme setting and demonstrate that, as presented, both of these and a construction from KPPYZ are insecure under an active dictator. However, two of the three can easily be modified to satisfy our definition. The second notion we propose considers a recipient who wishes to forge signatures. To motivate this notion, we identify a gap in an existing security definition from KPPYZ and present attacks that allow parties to be impersonated when using schemes erroneously deemed secure. We then formalize our new unforgeability definition to close this gap. Interestingly, while the new definition is only modestly different from the old one, the change introduces subtle technical challenges that arise when proving security. We overcome these challenges in our reanalysis of existing anamorphic signature schemes by showing they achieve our new notion when built from chosen-randomness secure signatures or with encryption that satisfies a novel ideal-model simulatability property.

There is a gap between the security of constrained PRFs required in some applications and the security provided by existing definitions. This gap is typically patched by only considering nonadaptive security or manually mixing the CPRF with a random oracle (implicitly constructing a new CPRF) to achieve adaptive security. We fill this gap with a new definition for constrained PRFs with strong adaptive security properties and proofs that it is achieved by practical constructions based on the cascade PRF (which generalizes the GGM construction) and AMAC. We apply the definition for analyzing searchable symmetric encryption and puncturable key wrapping.

The Fuchsbauer, Kiltz, and Loss (CRYPTO 2018) claim that (some) hardness results in the algebraic group model imply the same hardness results in the generic group model was recently called into question by Katz, Zhang, and Zhou (ASIACRYPT 2022). The latter gave an interpretation of the claim under which it is incorrect. We give an alternate interpretation under which it is correct, using natural frameworks for capturing generic and algebraic models for arbitrary algebraic structures. Most algebraic analyses in the literature can be captured by our frameworks, making the claim correct for them.

Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) allow a prover to convince a verifier of a statement's truth without revealing any other information. In recent years, ZKPs have matured into a practical technology underpinning major applications. However, implementing ZKP programs remains challenging, as they operate over arithmetic circuits that encode the logic of both the prover and the verifier. Therefore, developers must not only express the computations for generating proofs, but also explicitly specify the constraints for verification. As recent studies have shown, this decoupling may lead to critical ZKP-specific vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, existing tools for detecting them are limited, as they: (1) are tightly coupled to specific ZKP languages, (2) are confined to the constraint level, preventing reasoning about the underlying computations, (3) target only a narrow class of bugs, and (4) suffer from scalability bottlenecks due to reliance on SMT solvers.

To address these limitations, we propose a language-agnostic formal model, called the Domain Consistency Model (DCM), which captures the relationship between computations and constraints. Using this model, we provide a taxonomy of vulnerabilities based on computation-constraint mismatches, including novel subclasses overlooked by existing models. Next, we implement a lightweight automated bug detection tool, called CCC-Check, which is based on abstract interpretation. We evaluate CCC-Check on a dataset of 20 benchmark programs. Compared to the SoTA verification tool CIVER, our tool achieves a 100-1000$\times$ speedup, while maintaining a low false positive rate. Finally, using the DCM, we examine six widely adopted ZKP projects and uncover 15 previously unknown vulnerabilities. We reported these bugs to the projects' maintainers, 13 of which have since been patched. Of these 15 vulnerabilities, 12 could not be captured by existing models.

In this paper, we aim to explore the design of low-latency authenticated encryption schemes particularly for memory encryption, with a focus on the temporal uniqueness property. To achieve this, we present the low-latency Pseudo-Random Function (PRF) called $\mathtt{Twinkle}$ with an output up to 1152 bits. Leveraging only one block of $\texttt{Twinkle}$, we developed $\texttt{Twinkle-AE}$, a specialized authenticated encryption scheme with six variants covering different cache line sizes and security requirements. We also propose $\texttt{Twinkle-PA}$, a pointer authentication algorithm, which takes a 64-bit pointer and 64-bit context as input and outputs a tag of 1 to 32 bits. We conducted thorough security evaluations of both the PRFs and these schemes, examining their robustness against various common attacks. The results of our cryptanalysis indicate that these designs successfully achieve their targeted security objectives. Hardware implementations using the FreePDK45nm library show that $\texttt{Twinkle-AE}$ achieves an encryption and authentication latency of 3.83 $ns$ for a cache line. In comparison, $\texttt{AES}$-CTR with WC-MAC scheme and Ascon-128a achieve latencies of 9.78 $ns$ and 27.30 $ns$, respectively. For the pointer authentication scheme $\texttt{Twinkle-PA}$, the latency is 2.04 $ns$, while $\texttt{QARMA-64-}\sigma_0$ has a latency of 5.57 $ns$.

A recent study by Yamashita and Yasunaga (GameSec 2023) presented a constant-round deterministic broadcast protocol secure against \emph{detection-averse} adversaries --- those who prefer to attack without being detected. In this work, we revisit their protocol and observe that it remains secure even against a broader class of adversaries, not necessarily detection-averse. We formalize its detection mechanism as \emph{local detectability} and construct broadcast protocols with local detectability that address two weaknesses of the original protocol: (1) it only guarantees weak validity, and (2) it may cause false detections. Our first protocol achieves round complexity four against rational adversaries and $t+4$ against malicious adversaries, where the adversary corrupts at most $t$ parties. Our second protocol achieves the optimal round complexity of $t+1$ for malicious adversaries, while the round complexity is four against detection-averse adversaries.

We revisit the notion of Simulation Extractability (SE) for SNARKs in the updatable setting. We demonstrate that existing formal definitions of SE in this setting are insufficient to guarantee the required non-malleability in real-world scenarios. Towards this, we first identify and frame a malleability vulnerability: a cross-SRS reinterpretation attack, which shows that an adversary can reuse or maul proofs across different, correlated SRSs generated through the update procedure. This is made possible because existing security definitions fail to model an adversary’s ability to observe simulated proofs relative to various derived SRSs. To close this security gap, we propose a revised and stronger security notion of Updatable Simulation Extractability (USE) which was originally defined in [GKK+22]. Our definition models a dynamic environment where the SRS is adaptively updatable by the adversary, who can also query simulation oracles for proofs under the resulting family of reachable SRSs. This captures the full extent of the adversarial capabilities observed in practice. Finally, we provide positive results for popular polynomial-IOP-based SNARKs, and show that these schemes satisfy our stronger USE notion, provided the circuit-specific SRS is securely bound into the proof transcript, e.g., via a correct implementation of the Fiat-Shamir transformation.

This announcement is in connection with the recent IACR 2025 election conducted using the Helios electronic voting system. Regrettably, we have encountered a fatal technical problem that prevents us from concluding the election and accessing the final tally.

For this election and in accordance with the bylaws of the IACR, the three members of the IACR 2025 Election Committee acted as independent trustees, each holding a portion of the cryptographic key material required to jointly decrypt the results. This aspect of Helios’ design ensures that no two trustees could collude to determine the outcome of an election or the contents of individual votes on their own: all trustees must provide their decryption shares.

Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share. As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election.

This situation is visible on the public election page in Helios, where the trustees are listed: you can see that two trustees have successfully uploaded their decryption share material, whereas one has not. We point this out so that one can independently confirm that the issue arises from the strict cryptographic requirements of the system itself. You can consult this information at: https://vote.heliosvoting.org/helios/elections/e1130d04-aac6-11f0-95c8-3a40ecaef3ba/trustees/view

After careful consideration, we have decided that the only responsible course of action is to void this election and start a new election from scratch.

The new election will run from November 21 to December 20, using the same IACR membership electoral roll and the same list of candidates, which you can consult here: https://www.iacr.org/elections/2025/candidates.php

For all eligible voters, you will receive a separate Helios message inviting you to participate in the new run of the IACR 2025 election. Please note that if you opted out from Helios emails, we could not add you to the list of voters for the new election. In this case, you may opt back in at https://vote.heliosvoting.org/optin/ and send an email to elections@iacr.org to let us know, so that we can add you to the list of voters.

We are deeply sorry for this failure and for the disruption it has caused; this situation should not have happened, and we take it very seriously. We respectfully ask for your understanding and patience while we remedy the problem and ensure that the renewed process is as smooth, secure, and transparent as possible.

We are already drawing lessons from this incident and putting safeguards in place, so that it cannot reoccur. In particular, we will adopt a 2-out-of-3 threshold mechanism for the management of private keys, and we will circulate a clear written procedure for all trustees to follow before and during the election. Following the resignation of Moti Yung from his position as trustee for this election, he will be replaced by Michel Abdalla.

With our sincere apologies and best regards,

The IACR 2025 Election committee, with the approval of the IACR Board of Directors

We are proud to announce the winners of the 2025 IACR Test-of-Time Award for Asiacrypt.

The IACR Test-of-Time Award honors papers published at the 3 IACR flagship conferences 15 years ago which have had a lasting impact on the field.

The Test-of-Time award for Asiacrypt 2010 is awarded to the following paper:

Constant-Size Commitments to Polynomials and Their Applications
by Aniket Kate, Gregory M. Zaverucha, and Ian Goldberg

For introducing the first constant-size polynomial commitment scheme, a cornerstone of modern succinct zero-knowledge proofs.

Congratulations to the winners!

In this work, we initiate the formal study of oblivious batch updates over outsourced encrypted Bloom filters, focusing on scenarios where a storage-limited sender must insert or delete batches of elements in a Bloom filter maintained on an untrusted server. Our survey identifies only two prior approaches (CCS 2008 and CCS 2012) that can be adapted to this problem. However, they either fail to provide adequate security in dynamic scenarios or incur prohibitive update costs that scale with the filter’s maximum capacity rather than the actual batch size.

To address these limitations, we introduce a new cryptographic primitive, $\textit{Oblivious Bloom Filter Insertion}$ ($\textsf{OBFI}$), and propose novel constructions. At the core of our design is a novel building block, $\textit{Oblivious Bucket Distribution}$ ($\textsf{OBD}$), which enables a storage-limited sender to distribute a large array of elements, uniformly sampled from a finite domain, into small, fixed-size buckets in a data-oblivious manner determined by element order. The design of $\textsf{OBD}$ is further supported by identifying and proving a new structural property of such arrays, which establishes tight and explicit probabilistic bounds on the number of elements falling within predefined subranges of the domain.

Our $\textsf{OBFI}$ constructions achieve adaptive data-obliviousness and ensure that batch update costs scale primarily with the batch size. Depending on the variant, the sender’s storage requirement ranges from $O(\lambda)$, where $\lambda$ is the security parameter, down to $O(1)$. Finally, we demonstrate the practicality of $\textsf{OBFI}$ by integrating it into representative Bloom-filter-based cryptographic protocols for Searchable Symmetric Encryption, Public-key Encryption with Keyword Search, and Outsourced Private Set Intersection, thereby obtaining batch-updatable counterparts with state-of-the-art security and performance.

A Batched Threshold Encryption (BTE) scheme enables a committee of servers to perform a lightweight (in terms of communication and computation) threshold decryption of an arbitrary batch of ciphertexts from a larger pool, while ensuring the privacy of ciphertexts that are outside the batch. Such a primitive has a direct application in designing encrypted mempools for MEV protection in modern blockchains. Bormet et al. (USENIX 2025) recently proposed a BTE scheme called “BEAT-MEV” which is concretely efficient for small to moderate batch sizes.

In this work, we improve and extend the BEAT-MEV scheme in multiple ways. First, we improve the computational cost from quadratic to quasilinear in the batch size, thus making it practical for large batch sizes. This improvement is achieved by substituting the key-homomorphic punctured PRF used in BEAT-MEV with an FFT-friendly alternative. Second, we extend the ideas in their scheme to the weighted setting, where each server in the committee has an associated 'weight' value (e.g., stake weight of validators in PoS blockchains), while crucially ensuring that the communication cost remains independent of the weights. In contrast, BEAT-MEV with naive virtualization would incur communication cost linear in the total weight. Third, for handling the small failure rate inherent in BEAT-MEV scheme due to index collisions across different clients at the time of encryption, we propose a generalization of their suggested approach which offers an option to trade off between ciphertext size and server communication for a given failure rate.

We implement and evaluate our scheme and compare it with BEAT-MEV to demonstrate our concrete improvement. In the unweighted setting, we improve the computational cost (without increasing the communication cost) by ≈ 6× for a batch size of 512 ciphertexts. In the weighted setting, we improve the communication cost (without compromising computation time), over BEAT-MEV with naive virtualization, by ≈ 50× for 100 validators with total stake weight 5000 distributed as per the latest Solana stake distribution.

Given a circuit $G: \{0, 1\}^n \to \{0, 1\}^m$ with $m > n$, the *range avoidance* problem ($\text{Avoid}$) asks to output a string $y\in \{0, 1\}^m$ that is not in the range of $G$. Besides its profound connection to circuit complexity and explicit construction problems, this problem is also related to the existence of *proof complexity generators* --- circuits $G: \{0, 1\}^n \to \{0, 1\}^m$ where $m > n$ but for every $y\in \{0, 1\}^m$, it is infeasible to prove the statement "$y\not\in\mathrm{Range}(G)$" in a given propositional proof system.

This paper connects these two problems with the existence of *demi-bits generators*, a fundamental cryptographic primitive against nondeterministic adversaries introduced by Rudich (RANDOM '97). $\bullet$ We show that the existence of demi-bits generators implies $\text{Avoid}$ is hard for nondeterministic algorithms. This resolves an open problem raised by Chen and Li (STOC '24). Furthermore, assuming the demi-hardness of certain LPN-style generators or Goldreich's PRG, we prove the hardness of $\text{Avoid}$ even when the instances are constant-degree polynomials over $\mathbb{F}_2$. $\bullet$ We show that the dual weak pigeonhole principle is unprovable in Cook's theory $\mathsf{PV}_1$ under the existence of demi-bits generators secure against $\mathbf{AM}/_{O(1)}$, thereby separating Jeřábek's theory $\mathsf{APC}_1$ from $\mathsf{PV}_1$. Previously, Ilango, Li, and Williams (STOC '23) obtained the same separation under different (and arguably stronger) cryptographic assumptions. $\bullet$ We transform demi-bits generators to proof complexity generators that are *pseudo-surjective* in certain parameter regime. Pseudo-surjectivity is the strongest form of hardness considered in the literature for proof complexity generators.

Our constructions are inspired by the recent breakthroughs on the hardness of $\text{Avoid}$ by Ilango, Li, and Williams (STOC '23) and Chen and Li (STOC '24). We use *randomness extractors* to significantly simplify the construction and the proof.