International Association
for Cryptologic Research

(For NUS SoC CS Dept)

Research Fellow

National University of Singapore

Description:

“NUS-Singtel Cyber Security R&D Lab” (http://nus-singtel.nus.edu.sg/) is a 5 years joint project with about SGD 43 mil (approximately USD 31 mil) of funds contributed by Singapore Telecommunications Limited (SingTel), National University of Singapore (NUS), and National Research Foundation (NRF) of Singapore. The R&D Lab will conduct research in four broad areas of cyber security having strategic relevance to Singtel’s business: (1) Predictive Security Analytics; (2) Network, Data and Cloud Security; (3) Internet-of-Things and Industrial Control Systems; (4) Future-Ready Cyber Security Systems.

NUS-SingTel Lab currently has one research fellow position with competitive pay. It is available to (fresh) PhD graduates in computer science/engineering from Singapore or overseas.

The Research Fellow will be responsible for working closely with the Principal Investigator and lab members on a new 3-year research project which just starts in June 2018. He/she should possess experience or interest in at least some of the following research areas:

• Key management, Authentication, Authorization and Access control

• Trusted computing (e.g. TPM, Intel SGX)

• Post-quantum cryptography

Job requirements:

• A PhD degree in a relevant area (Computer Science/Engineer, mathematics, etc);

• Good publication record in cyber security and crypto area

o Publication in Rank 1 Cyber Security or Crypto Conference, or AsiaCrypt, ESORICS, ACSAC, TCC, Euro S&P, etc;

• Good communication skills (English), self-motivated and good team players;

• Some experience in programming is a plus;

• Willing to perform practical research which may eventually lead to products

To apply for the above position, please send a copy of your recent CV to comxj (at) nus.edu.sg with an email subject “Application for RF”.

Closing date for applications: 31 December 2018

Contact: Dr Xu (comxj (at) nus.edu.sg)

More information: https://www.nus-singtel.nus.edu.sg/

The Centre for Cyber Security and Privacy at the University of Birmingham has 4 open vacancies for PhD students to start Sept/Oct 2018. This is an opportunity to join a successful and growing research group with a healthy cohort of PhD students (currently 15). Full stipends are available (including UK/EU tuition fees).

Candidates should have a background including cyber security (e.g. good grades in cyber security modules, a strong cyber security final project, or being on a dedicated cyber security course). Given the focus of all three studentships on hardware and attacks, candidates should additionally have a demonstrable interest in and familiarity with hardware security, pentesting, embedded systems and/or side-channel attacks.

The available projects (with supervisors and stipends) are:

• Cyber Security for the Vehicles of Tomorrow (Flavio Garcia) £14,553 for 3 years
• User-controlled Hardware Security Anchors: Evaluation and Design (Mark Ryan, Flavio Garcia, David Oswald) £14,553 for 3 years
• BioLeak: Side-Channel Analysis of Fingerprint Matching Algorithms (David Oswald, Flavio Garcia) £22,000 for 3 years
• FaultFinder: from Faulty Output to Fault Model – an Automated Approach (David Oswald, Flavio Garcia) £22,000 for 3 years

For more information please contact the relevant supervisors or our centre administrator. Please note that for BioLeak and FaultFinder candidates must be UK citizens.

Closing date for applications: 25 June 2018

Contact: Garfield Benjamin (administrator) g.r.benjamin (at) cs.bham.ac.uk

Mark Ryan (Professor) m.d.ryan (at) cs.bham.ac.uk

Flavio Garcia (Professor) f.garcia (at) cs.bham.ac.uk

David Oswald (Lecturer) d.f.oswald (at) cs.bham.ac.uk

More information: https://sec.cs.bham.ac.uk/

The chair MAIS at TU Darmstadt, led by Prof. Dr. Heiko Mantel, is offering multiple positions. We are looking for researchers who are interested in addressing foundational problems that will be of practical relevance or in addressing practical problems based on solid foundations. The research focus shall be on software security (information-flow security or side-channel analysis) using formal methods or systematic experiments.

We are offering three positions for Ph.D. candidates and Postdocs in the following areas:

1. information-flow analysis techniques for object-oriented programs at the level of source code and bytecode based on compositional and precise verification techniques
2. experimental analysis of side-channel vulnerabilities in cryptographic implementations and generation of attacks exploiting such vulnerabilities
3. program analysis techniques for detecting side-channel vulnerabilities in cryptographic implementations and for assessing the seriousness of such vulnerabilities

The overall goal of our research at MAIS is to make software-based systems more trustworthy (i.e. secure, safe, and correct) than they are today. As software engineering is a complex and error-prone task,

we employ formal methods in combination with experiments for reasoning about software and critical system properties. We investigate software systems on the level of source code, bytecode, and machine code as well as on the level of more abstract system specifications. This allows us to provide support for security at different stages of software

development. At MAIS we are offering a productive and collaborative research environment in which you can discuss ideas with other team members working on related topics.

The positions are available immediately and applications will be considered until the positions are taken. These are positions with regular salary and social benefits based on TV-TUD. For more information and how to apply, see http://www.mais.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/Positions.html.

Closing date for applications:

Event date: 22 October to 26 October 2018
Submission deadline: 3 July 2018
Notification: 2 August 2018

State channels are a leading approach for improving the scalability of blockchains and cryptocurrencies. They allow a group of distrustful parties to optimistically execute an application-defined program amongst themselves, while the blockchain serves as a backstop in case of a dispute or abort. This effectively bypasses the congestion, fees and performance constraints of the underlying blockchain in the typical case. However, state channels introduce a new and undesirable assumption that a party must remain on-line and synchronised with the blockchain at all times to defend against execution fork attacks. An execution fork can revert a state channel’s history, potentially causing financial damage to a party that is innocent except for having crashed. To provide security even to parties that may go off-line for an extended period of time, we present Pisa, a protocol enables such parties to delegate to a third party, called the custodian, to cancel execution forks on their behalf. To evaluate Pisa, we provide a proof-of-concept implementation for a simplified Sprites and we demonstrate that it is cost-efficient to deploy on the Ethereum network.

We present three smart contracts that allow a briber to fairly exchange bribes to miners who pursue a mining strategy benefiting the briber. The first contract, CensorshipCon, highlights that Ethereum’s uncle block reward policy can directly subsidise the cost of bribing miners. The second contract, HistoryRevisionCon, rewards miners via an in-band payment for reversing transactions or enforcing a new state of another contract. The third contract, GoldfingerCon, rewards miners in one cryptocurrency for reducing the utility of another cryptocurrency. This work is motivated by the need to understand the extent to which smart contracts can impact the incentive mechanisms involved in Nakamoto-style consensus protocols.

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) is a problem of fundamental interest in cryptography. Traditional MPC protocols treat a "lazy" party (one that behaves honestly but aborts in the middle of the protocol execution) as a corrupt party that is colluding with the other corrupt parties. However, this outlook is unrealistic as there are various cases where an honest party may abort and turn "lazy" during the execution of a protocol without colluding with other parties. To address this gap, we initiate the study of what we call secure lazy multi-party computation with a formal definition that achieves meaningful correctness and security guarantees. We then construct a three-round lazy MPC protocol from standard cryptographic assumptions. Our protocol is malicious secure in the presence of a CRS and semi-malicious secure in the plain model without a CRS.

Using the techniques from above, we also achieve independently interesting consequences in the traditional MPC model. We construct the first round-optimal (three rounds) MPC protocol in the plain model (without a CRS) that achieves guaranteed output delivery (GOD) and is malicious-secure in the presence of an honest majority of parties. Previously, Gordon et al. [CRYPTO' 15] constructed a three-round protocol that achieves GOD in the honest majority setting, but required a CRS. They also showed that it is impossible to construct two-round protocols for the same even in the presence of a CRS. Thus, our result is the first 3-round GOD protocol that does not require any trusted setup, and it is optimal in terms of round complexity.

Furthermore, all our above protocols have communication complexity proportional only to the depth of the circuit being evaluated.

The key technical tool in our above protocols is a primitive called threshold multi-key fully homomorphic encryption which we define and construct assuming just learning with errors (LWE). We believe this primitive may be of independent interest.

An important initialization step in many social-networking applications is contact discovery, which allows a user of the service to identify which of its existing social contacts also use the service. Naive approaches to contact discovery reveal a user's entire set of social/professional contacts to the service, presenting a significant tension between functionality and privacy.

In this work, we present a system for private contact discovery, in which the client learns only the intersection of its own contact list and a server's user database, and the server learns only the (approximate) size of the client's list. The protocol is specifically tailored to the case of a small client set and large user database. Our protocol has provable security guarantees and combines new ideas with state-of-the-art techniques from private information retrieval and private set intersection.

We report on a highly optimized prototype implementation of our system, which is practical on real-world set sizes. For example, contact discovery between a client with 1024 contacts and a server with 67 million user entries takes 1.36 sec (when using server multi-threading) and uses only 4.28 MiB of communication.

Wang et al. (CCS 2017) recently proposed a protocol for malicious secure two-party computation that represents the state-of-the- art with regard to concrete efficiency in both the single-execution and amortized settings, with or without preprocessing. We show here several optimizations of their protocol that result in a significant improvement in the overall communication and running time. Specifically:

- We show how to make the “authenticated garbling” at the heart of their protocol compatible with the half-gate optimization of Zahur et al. (Eurocrypt 2015). We also show how to avoid sending an information-theoretic MAC for each garbled row. These two optimizations give up to a 2.6x improvement in communication, and make the communication of the online phase essentially equivalent to that of state-of-the-art semi-honest secure computation.

- We show various optimizations to their protocol for generating AND triples that, overall, result in a 1.5x improvement in the communication and a 2x improvement in the computation for that step.

We present two new, highly efficient, protocols for securely generating a distributed RSA key pair in the two-party setting. One protocol is semi-honestly secure and the other maliciously secure. Both are constant round and do not rely on any specific number-theoretic assumptions and improve significantly over the state-of-the-art by allowing a slight leakage (which we show to not affect security).

For our maliciously secure protocol our most significant improvement comes from executing most of the protocol in a ``strong'' semi-honest manner and then doing a single, light, zero-knowledge argument of correct execution. We introduce other significant improvements as well. One such improvement arrives in showing that certain, limited leakage does not compromise security, which allows us to use lightweight subprotocols. Another improvement, which may be of independent interest, comes in our approach for multiplying two large integers using OT, in the malicious setting, without being susceptible to a selective-failure attack. Finally, we implement our malicious protocol and show that its performance is an order of magnitude better than the best previous protocol, which provided only semi-honest security.

We revisit constructions of asymmetric primitives from obfuscation and give simpler alternatives. We consider public-key encryption, (hierarchical) identity-based encryption ((H)IBE), and predicate encryption. Obfuscation has already been shown to imply PKE by Sahai and Waters (STOC'14) and full-fledged functional encryption by Garg et al. (FOCS'13). We simplify all these constructions and reduce the necessary assumptions on the class of circuits that the obfuscator needs to support. Our PKE scheme relies on just a PRG and does not need any puncturing. Our IBE and bounded HIBE schemes convert natural key-delegation mechanisms from (recursive) applications of puncturable PRFs to IBE and HIBE schemes. Our most technical contribution is an unbounded HIBE, which uses (public-coin) differing-inputs obfuscation for circuits and whose proof relies on a recent pebbling-based hybrid argument by Fuchsbauer et al. (ASIACRYPT'14). All our constructions are anonymous, support arbitrary inputs, and have compact keys and ciphertexts.

The generalized birthday problem (GBP) was introduced by Wagner in 2002 and has shown to have many applications in cryptanalysis. In its typical variant, we are given access to a function $H:\{0,1\}^{\ell} \rightarrow \{0,1\}^n$ (whose specification depends on the underlying problem) and an integer $K>0$. The goal is to find $K$ distinct inputs to $H$ (denoted by $\{x_i\}_{i=1}^{K}$) such that $\sum_{i=1}^{K}H(x_i) = 0$. Wagner's K-tree algorithm solves the problem in time and memory complexities of about $N^{1/(\lfloor \log K \rfloor + 1)}$ (where $N= 2^n$). Two important open problems raised by Wagner were (1) devise efficient time-memory tradeoffs for GBP, and (2) reduce the complexity of the K-tree algorithm for $K$ which is not a power of 2.

In this paper, we make progress in both directions. First, we improve the best know GBP time-memory tradeoff curve (published by independently by Nikoli\'{c} and Sasaki and also by Biryukov and Khovratovich) for all $K \geq 8$ from $T^2M^{\lfloor \log K \rfloor -1} = N$ to $T^{\lceil (\log K)/2 \rceil + 1 }M^{\lfloor (\log K)/2 \rfloor} = N$, applicable for a large range of parameters. For example, for $K = 8$ we improve the best previous tradeoff from $T^2M^2 = N$ to $T^3M = N$ and for $K = 32$ the improvement is from $T^2M^4 = N$ to $T^4M^2 = N$.

Next, we consider values of $K$ which are not powers of 2 and show that in many cases even more efficient time-memory tradeoff curves can be obtained. Most interestingly, for $K \in \{6,7,14,15\}$ we present algorithms with the same time complexities as the K-tree algorithm, but with significantly reduced memory complexities. In particular, for $K=6$ the K-tree algorithm achieves $T=M=N^{1/3}$, whereas we obtain $T=N^{1/3}$ and $M=N^{1/6}$. For $K=14$, Wagner's algorithm achieves $T=M=N^{1/4}$, while we obtain $T=N^{1/4}$ and $M=N^{1/8}$. This gives the first significant improvement over the K-tree algorithm for small $K$.

Finally, we optimize our techniques for several concrete GBP instances and show how to solve some of them with improved time and memory complexities compared to the state-of-the-art.

Our results are obtained using a framework that combines several algorithmic techniques such as variants of the Schroeppel-Shamir algorithm for solving knapsack problems (devised in works by Howgrave-Graham and Joux and by Becker, Coron and Joux) and dissection algorithms (published by Dinur, Dunkelman, Keller and Shamir). It then builds on these techniques to develop new GBP algorithms.

Tendermint-core blockchains offer strong consistency (no forks) in an open system relying on two ingredients (i) a set of validators that generate blocks via a variant of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant (PBFT) consensus protocol and (ii) a rewarding mechanism that dynamically selects nodes to be validators for the next block via proof-of-stake, a non-energy consuming alternative of proof-of-work. It is well-known that in those open systems the main threat is the tragedy of commons that may yield the system to collapse if the rewarding mechanism is not adequate. At minima the rewarding mechanism must be $fair$, i.e. distributing the rewards in proportion to the merit of participants. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, we provide a formal description of Tendermint-core protocol and we prove that in eventual synchronous systems (i) it verifies a variant of one-shot consensus for the validation of one single block and (ii) a variant of the repeated consensus problem for multiple blocks. Our second contribution relates to the fairness of Tendermint rewarding mechanism. We prove that Tendermint rewarding is not fair. However, a small twist in the protocol makes it eventually fair. Additionally, we prove that there exists an (eventual) fair rewarding mechanism in repeated consensus-based blockchains if and only if the system is (eventually) synchronous.

Authenticated ciphers offer potential benefits to resource-constrained devices in the Internet of Things (IoT). The CAESAR competition seeks optimal authenticated ciphers based on several criteria, including performance in resource-constrained (i.e., low-area, low-power, and low-energy) hardware. Although the competition specified a ”lightweight” use case for Round 3, most hardware submissions to Round 3 were not lightweight implementations, in that they employed architectures optimized for best throughput-to-area (TP/A) ratio, and used the Pre- and PostProcessor modules from the CAE-SAR Hardware (HW) Development Package designed for high-speed applications. In this research, we provide true lightweight implementations of selected ciphers (ACORN, NORX, CLOC-AES, SILC-AES, and SILC-LED). These implementations use an improved version of the CAESAR HW DevelopmentPackage designed for lightweight applications, and are fully compliant with the CAESAR HW Application programming interface for Authenticated Ciphers. Our lightweight implementations achieve an average of 55% reduction in area and40% reduction in power compared to their corresponding high-speed versions. Although the average energy per bit of lightweight ciphers increases by a factor of 3.6, the lightweight version of NORX actually uses 47% less energy per bit than its corresponding high-speed implementation.

We study the exact round complexity of secure multiparty computation (MPC) in the honest majority setting. We construct the following round-optimal protocols in the plain model:

- Security with abort: Assuming public-key encryption (PKE), we construct two round MPC that achieves security with abort against any $t<\frac{n}{2}$ malicious corruptions. Previously, the best known two round protocols only achieved weaker security notions against smaller corruption thresholds.

- Guaranteed output delivery: Assuming PKE, we construct two round MPC over broadcast and private channels that achieves security with guaranteed output delivery against any $t<\frac{n}{2}$ (semi-honest) fail-stop corruptions. This result overcomes the lower bounds of Gennaro et al. [CRYPTO'02] and Gordon et al. [CRYPTO'15]. With the additional assumption of Zaps, we also construct three round MPC in the broadcast model that achieves security with guaranteed output delivery against any $t<\frac{n}{2}$ malicious corruptions. Previously, such a protocol was only known in the common reference model, based on specific learning assumptions.

All of our results are obtained via general compilers that may be of independent interest.

Secure computations on big data call for protocols that have sublinear communication complexity in the input length. While fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) provides a general solution to the problem, employing it on a large scale is currently quite far from being practical. This is also the case for secure computation tasks that reduce to weaker forms of FHE such as ''somewhat homomorphic encryption'' or single-server private information retrieval (PIR).

Quite unexpectedly, Aggarwal, Mishra, and Pinkas (Eurocrypt 2004), Brickell and Shmatikov (Asiacrypt 2005), and shelat and Venkitasubramaniam (Asiacrypt 2015) have shown that in several natural instances of secure computation on big data, there are practical sublinear communication protocols that only require sublinear local computation and minimize the use of expensive public-key operations. This raises the question of whether similar protocols exist for other natural problems.

In this paper we put forward a framework for separating ''practical'' sublinear protocols from ''impractical'' ones, and establish a methodology for identifying ''provably hard'' big-data problems that do not admit practical protocols. This is akin to the use of NP-completeness to separate hard algorithmic problems from easy ones. We show that while the previous protocols of Aggarwal et al., Brickell and Shmatikov, and shelat and Venkitasubramaniam are indeed classified as being ''practical'' in this framework, slight variations of the problems they solve and other natural computational problems on big data are hard.

Our negative results are established by showing that the problem at hand is ''PIR-hard'' in the sense that any secure protocol for the problem implies PIR on a large database. This imposes a barrier on the local computational cost of secure protocols for the problem. We also identify a new natural relaxation of PIR that we call semi-PIR, which is useful for establishing ''intermediate hardness'' of several practically motivated secure computation tasks. We show that semi-PIR implies slightly sublinear PIR via an adaptive black-box reduction and that ruling out a stronger black-box reduction would imply a major breakthrough in complexity theory. We also establish information-theoretic separations between semi-PIR and PIR, showing that some problems that we prove to be semi-PIR-hard are not PIR-hard.

Protocols for secure multiparty computation enable a set of parties to compute a function of their inputs without revealing anything but the output. The security properties of the protocol must be preserved in the presence of adversarial behavior. The two classic adversary models considered are semi-honest (where the adversary follows the protocol specification but tries to learn more than allowed by examining the protocol transcript) and malicious (where the adversary may follow any arbitrary attack strategy). Protocols for semi-honest adversaries are often far more efficient, but in many cases the security guarantees are not strong enough.

In this paper, we present new protocols for securely computing any functionality represented by an arithmetic circuit. We utilize a new method for verifying that the adversary does not cheat, that yields a cost of just twice that of semi-honest protocols in some settings. Our protocols are information-theoretically secure in the presence of a malicious adversaries, assuming an honest majority. We present protocol variants for small and large fields, and show how to efficiently instantiate them based on replicated secret sharing and Shamir sharing. As with previous works in this area aiming to achieve high efficiency, our protocol is secure with abort and does not achieve fairness, meaning that the adversary may receive output while the honest parties do not.

We implemented our protocol and ran experiments for different numbers of parties, different network configurations and different circuit depths. Our protocol significantly outperforms the previous best for this setting (Lindell and Nof, CCS 2017); for a large number of parties, our implementation runs almost an order of magnitude faster than theirs.

The slightly subexponential algorithm of Blum, Kalai and Wasserman (BKW) provides a basis for assessing LPN/LWE security. However, its huge memory consumption strongly limits its practical applicability, thereby preventing precise security estimates for cryptographic LPN/LWE instantiations.

We provide the first time-memory trade-offs for the BKW algorithm. For instance, we show how to solve LPN in dimension $k$ in time $2^{\frac 43\frac k{\log k}}$ and memory $2^{\frac 23\frac k{\log k}}$. Using the Dissection technique due to Dinur et al. (Crypto ’12) and a novel, slight generalization thereof, we obtain fine-grained trade-offs for any available (subexponential) memory while the running time remains subexponential.

Reducing the memory consumption of BKW below its running time also allows us to propose a first quantum version QBKW for the BKW algorithm.

In this paper, we study the condition of finding small solutions $(x,y,z)=(x_0, y_0, z_0)$ of the equation $Bx-Ay=z$. The framework is derived from Wiener's small private exponent attack on RSA and May-Ritzenhofen's investigation about the implicit factorization problem, both of which can be generalized to solve the above equation. We show that these two methods, together with Coppersmith's method, are equivalent for solving $Bx-Ay=z$ in the general case. Then based on Coppersmith's method, we present two improvements for solving $Bx-Ay=z$ in some special cases. The first improvement pays attention to the case where either $\gcd(x_0,z_0,A)$ or $\gcd(y_0,z_0,B)$ is large enough. As the applications of this improvement, we propose some new cryptanalysis of RSA, such as new results about the generalized implicit factorization problem, attacks with known bits of the prime factor, and so on. The motivation of these applications comes from oracle based complexity of factorization problems. The second improvement assumes that the value of $C \equiv z_0\ (\mathrm{mod}\ x_0)$ is known. We present two attacks on RSA as its applications. One focuses on the case with known bits of the private exponent together with the prime factor, and the other considers the case with a small difference of the two prime factors. Our new attacks on RSA improve the previous corresponding results respectively, and the correctness of the approach is verified by experiments.

In state-of-the-art e-voting systems, a bulletin board (BB) is a critical component for preserving election integrity and availability. Although it is common in the literature to assume that a BB is a centralized entity that is trusted, in the recent works of Culnane and Schneider [CSF 2014] and Chondros et al. [ICDCS 2016], the importance of removing BB as a single point of failure has been extensively discussed. Motivated by these works, we introduce a framework for the formal security analysis of the BB functionality modeled as a distributed system that comprises (i) a subsystem of item collection (IC) peers that receive and store the submitted items, and (ii) a subsystem of audit board (AB) peers, where the IC subsystem publishes the stored items for verification. Our framework treats a secure BB as a robust public transaction ledger, defined by Garay et al. [Eurocrypt 2015], that additionally supports the generation of receipts for successful posting. Namely, in our model, a secure BB system achieves Persistence and Liveness that are confirmable, in the sense that any malicious behavior of the BB system can be detected via a verification mechanism.

As a case study for our framework, we analyze the BB system of Culnane and Schneider and point out its weaknesses. We demonstrate an attack revealing that the said system does not achieve Confirmable Liveness, even in the case where the adversary is computationally bounded and covert, i.e., it may deviate from the protocol specification but does not want to be detected. In addition, we show that special care should be taken for the choice of the underlying cryptographic primitives, so that the claimed fault tolerance threshold of N/3 out-of N corrupted IC peers is preserved.

Next, based on our analysis, we introduce a new BB protocol that upgrades the [CSF 2014] protocol. We prove that it tolerates any number less than N/3 out-of N corrupted IC peers both for Persistence and Confirmable Liveness, against a computationally bounded general Byzantine adversary. Furthermore, Persistence can also be Confirmable, if we distribute the AB (originally a centralized entity in [CSF 2014]) as a replicated service with honest majority.