International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Event date: 15 August 2020
Submission deadline: 10 May 2020
Notification: 1 July 2020

Funded position for PhD in the Mathematics of Post-Quantum Cryptography, to work on theoretical questions. The research will be on some or all of the following: isogenies, algebraic geometry, codes, lattices. The ideal candidate will have a strong undergraduate mathematics knowledge including abstract algebra, number theory and geometry. An MSc is a plus. Experience with computer programming and cryptography is also desirable. This is part of a collaboration with the group of Prof. Steven Galbraith at the University of Auckland and interaction with this group is expected.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Prof. Felipe Voloch

More information: http://www.math.canterbury.ac.nz/~f.voloch/prospective.html

BIMSA

Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications (BIMSA) is a new research institution to be established and lead by Professor Shing-Tung Yau, a Fields medalist of 1982. Its location is in the Yanqi Lake area of Beijing where APEC 2014 was hosted. It was expected to launch by the end of March 2020.

Program

Advanced Cryptography and Blockchain Program will be one of the many research groups of BIMSA. It will be focused on:

• zero knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs etc.)
• fully homomorphic encryption
• secure multiparty computation
• other related cryptographic schemes
• blockchain

with a combination of theoretical studies and practical implementations.

Positions

We have 20 open positions on all levels, with competitive compensation packages:

• Distinguished Research Professor
• Research Professor
• Associate Research Professor
• Assistant Research Professor (tenure-track)
• Visiting Research Professor
• Research Fellowship (postdoc)

We intend to build a strong and highly international team, participating in the mainstream of academic studies and industrial innovations worldwide.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Prof. Kevin Mo

More information: http://ymsc.tsinghua.edu.cn/en/content/show/91-275.html https://www.mathjobs.org/jobs/jobs/14633 https://www.linkedin.co

Event date: 20 August to 21 August 2020
Submission deadline: 24 April 2020
Notification: 29 May 2020

Event date: 25 May to 29 May 2020

Cryptography, Security & Privacy Research Group at Koç University has multiple openings for summer research interns.

For summer research opportunities (at both undergraduate and graduate level), visit

http://kusrp.ku.edu.tr

All applications must be completed online. Deadline is 29 March 2020.

For more information about joining our group and projects, visit

https://crypto.ku.edu.tr/work-with-us/

Application Requirements:

1. CV
2. 2 Recommendation Letters
3. Official transcripts from all the universities attended
4. Statement of Purpose
5. Application Form filled online

Closing date for applications:

Contact: http://kusrp.ku.edu.tr

More information: http://kusrp.ku.edu.tr

In this work, we propose a new table-based block cipher structure, dubbed $\mathsf{FPL}$, that can be used to build white-box secure block ciphers. Our construction is a balanced Feistel cipher, where the input to each round function determines multiple indices for the underlying table via a probe function, and the sum of the values from the table becomes the output of the round function. We identify the properties of the probe function that make the resulting block cipher white-box secure in terms of weak and strong space hardness against known-space and non-adaptive chosen-space attacks. Our construction, enjoying rigorous provable security without relying on any ideal primitive, provides flexibility to the block size and the table size, and permits parallel table look-ups.

We also propose a concrete instantiation of $\mathsf{FPL}$, dubbed $\mathsf{FPL}_{\mathsf{AES}}$, using (round-reduced) $\mathsf{AES}$ for the underlying table and probe functions. Our implementation shows that $\mathsf{FPL}_{\mathsf{AES}}$ provides stronger security without significant loss of efficiency, compared to existing schemes including $\mathsf{SPACE}$, $\mathsf{WhiteBlock}$ and $\mathsf{WEM}$.

It has been suspected that in supersingular isogeny-based cryptosystems the two ending elliptic curves computed by the participants are exactly equal. Resolving this open problem has not been pressing because the elliptic curves are known to be isomorphic, and therefore share a $j$-invariant which can be used as a shared secret. However, this is still an interesting independent problem as other values of the elliptic curves may be valuable as shared information as well. This note answers this open problem in the affirmative.

This paper presents Foxtail+, a new shared-key protocol to securely authenticate resource constrained devices, such as Internet of things (IoT) devices. Foxtail+ is based on a previously proposed protocol to authenticate unaided humans, called the Foxtail protocol, which we modify for authenticating resource constrained devices. It uses a computationally lightweight function, called the Foxtail function, which makes it ideal for IoT nodes with low memory, computational, and/or battery resources. We introduce a new family of functions based on the Foxtail function, analyze its security in terms of the number of samples required to obtain the secret, and demonstrate how it is connected with the learning with rounding (LWR) problem. We then build the Foxtail+ protocol from this function family, secure against active adversaries. Finally, we implement and experimentally evaluate the performance of Foxtail+ against a similar alternate protocol, i.e., the modified version of the Hopper and Blum protocol called HB+, and a block cipher based protocol instantiated with AES. The experiments are run on an IoT device connected to a LoRa network which is an IoT specific Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN). We show that Foxtail+ outperforms HB+ in terms of overall communication and energy cost, and its parallel implementation is comparable to the AES-based protocol in terms of time and energy consumption. To our knowledge, we provide the first implementation of any member of the HB+ family of protocols that directly compares its performance against an AES-based protocol in terms of time and power consumption. Our experiments shed new light on some of the limitations of identification protocols based on lightweight primitives, of which Foxtail+ is a member, over block cipher based protocols.

We present in this paper a blind signature and its partially blind variant based on lattices assumptions. Blind signature is a cornerstone in privacy-oriented cryptography and we propose the first lattice based scheme without restart. Compare to related work, the key idea of our construction is to provide a trapdoor to the signer in order to let him perform some gaussian pre-sampling during the signature generation process, preventing this way to restart from scratch the whole protocol. We prove the security of our scheme under the ring k-SIS assumption, in the random oracle model. We also explain security issues in the other existing lattice-based blind signature schemes. Finally, we propose a partially blind variant of our scheme, which is done with no supplementary cost, as the number of elements generated and exchanged during the signing protocol is exactly the same.

Two-source non-malleable extractors are pseudorandom objects which extract randomness even when an adversary is allowed to learn the behavior of the extractor on tamperings of the input weak sources, and they have found important applications in non-malleable coding and secret sharing. We begin by asking how hard it is to improve upon the best known constructions of such objects (Chattopadhyay, Goyal, Li, STOC 2016, and Li, STOC 2017). We show that even small improvements to these constructions lead to explicit low-error two-source extractors for very low linear min-entropy, a longstanding open problem in pseudorandomness.

Given the result above in the information-theoretic setting, we turn to studying two-source non-malleable extractors in the computational setting, namely in the CRS model first considered in (Garg, Kalai, Khurana, Eurocrypt 2020). We enforce that both the sampling process for the input sources and the tampering functions must be efficient, but we do not necessarily put such a constraint on the adversary distinguishing the output of the extractor from uniform. We obtain results about two-source non-malleable extractors in the CRS model under different types of hardness assumptions:

- Under standard assumptions, we show that small improvements upon state-of-the-art statistical two-source non-malleable extractors also yield explicit low-error two-source non-malleable extractors in the CRS model for low min-entropy against computationally unbounded distinguishers. Remarkably, all previous results on computational extractors require much stronger assumptions; - Under a quasi-polynomial hardness assumption, we give explicit constructions of low-error two-source non-malleable extractors in the CRS model with much lower min-entropy requirements than their best statistical counterparts, against a computationally bounded distinguisher; - Assuming the existence of nearly optimal collision-resistant hash functions, we give a simple explicit construction of a low-error two-source non-malleable extractors in the CRS model for very low min-entropy, against a computationally unbounded distinguisher.

We present new non-interactive zero-knowledge argument systems (NIZK), based on standard assumptions that were previously not known to imply it. In particular, we rely on the hardness of both the learning parity with noise (LPN) assumption, and the existence of trapdoor hash functions (TDH, defined by Döttling et al., Crypto 2019). Such TDH can be based on a number of standard assumptions, including DDH, QR, DCR, and LWE. We revisit the correlation intractability (CI) framework for converting $\Sigma$-protocols into NIZK, and present a different strategy for instantiating it by putting together two new components. First, while prior works considered the search-complexity of the relations for which CI is sought,we consider their probabilistic representation. Namely, a distribution over lower-complexity functions that bitwise-computes the target function with all but small (constant) probability. The second component is a new perspective for quantifying the class of relations for which CI is achieved. We show that it is instructive to consider CI for approximable relations (CI-Apx) which is quantified by a class of relations, but requires CI to hold against any approximation of any relation in this class. We show that CI-Apx for just constant-degree polynomials suffices for NIZK, if the under-lying $\Sigma$-protocol is implemented using a suitable commitment scheme. We show that such a commitment scheme can be constructed based on LPN. We then show how to construct CI-Apx for constant-degree polynomials from any suitable TDH (with an enhanced correctness property that is satisfied by all existing TDH constructions).

The problem of secret-key based authentication under privacy and storage constraints on the source sequence is considered. The identifier measurement channels during authentication are assumed to be controllable via a cost-constrained action sequence. Single-letter inner and outer bounds for the key-leakage-storage-cost regions are derived for a generalization of a classic two-terminal key agreement model with an eavesdropper that observes a sequence that is correlated with the sequences observed by the legitimate terminals. The additions to the model are that the encoder observes a noisy version of a remote source, and the noisy output and the remote source output together with an action sequence are given as inputs to the measurement channel at the decoder. Thus, correlation is introduced between the noise components on the encoder and decoder measurements. The model with a secret-key generated by an encoder is extended to the randomized models, where a secret-key is embedded to the encoder. The results are relevant for several user and device authentication scenarios including physical and biometric identifiers with multiple measurements that provide diversity and multiplexing gains. To illustrate the behavior of the rate region, achievable (secret-key rate, storage-rate, cost) tuples are given for binary identifiers and measurement channels that can be represented as a set of binary symmetric subchannels. The gains from using an action sequence such as a large secret-key rate at a significantly small hardware cost, are illustrated to motivate the use of low-complexity transform-coding algorithms with cost-constrained actions.

Dwork and Naor (FOCS '00) defined ZAPs as 2-message witness-indistinguishable proofs that are public-coin. We relax this to ``ZAPs with private randomness'' (ZAPRs), where the verifier can use private coins to sample the first message (independently of the statement being proved), but the proof must remain publicly verifiable given only the protocol transcript. In particular, ZAPRs are reusable, meaning that the first message can be reused for multiple proofs without compromising security.

Known constructions of ZAPs from trapdoor permutations or bilinear maps are only computationally WI (and statistically sound). Two recent results of Badrinarayanan-Fernando-Jain-Khurana-Sahai and Goyal-Jain-Jin-Malavolta [EUROCRYPT '20] construct the first statistical ZAP arguments, which are statistically WI (and computationally sound), from the quasi-polynomial LWE assumption. Here, we construct statistical ZAPR arguments from the quasi-polynomial decision-linear (DLIN) assumption on groups with a bilinear map. Our construction relies on a combination of several tools, including the Groth-Ostrovsky-Sahai NIZK and NIWI [EUROCRYPT '06, CRYPTO '06, JACM '12], ``sometimes-binding statistically hiding commitments'' [Kalai-Khurana-Sahai, EUROCRYPT '18] and the ``MPC-in-the-head'' technique [Ishai-Kushilevitz-Ostrovsky-Sahai, STOC '07].

To maintain the availability of industrial control systems (ICS), it is important to robustly detect malware infection that spreads within the ICS network. In ICS, a host often communicates with the determined hosts; for instance, a supervisory control host observes and controls the same devices routinely via the network. Therefore, a communication request to the unused internet protocol (IP) address space, i.e. darknet, in the ICS network is likely to be caused by malware in the compromised host in the network. That is, darknet monitoring may enable us to detect malware that tries to spread indiscriminately within the network. On the other hand, advanced malware, such as malware determining target hosts of infection with reference to host lists in the networks, infects the confined hosts in the networks, and consequently evades detection by security sensors or honeypots. In this paper, we propose novel deception techniques that lure such malware to our sensor, by embedding the sensor information continuously in the lists of hosts in the ICS networks. In addition, the feasibility of the proposed deception techniques is shown through our simplified implementation by using actual malware samples: WannaCry and Conficker.

The right of an individual to request the deletion of their personal data by an entity that might be storing it -- referred to as the right to be forgotten -- has been explicitly recognized, legislated, and exercised in several jurisdictions across the world, including the European Union, Argentina, and California. However, much of the discussion surrounding this right offers only an intuitive notion of what it means for it to be fulfilled -- of what it means for such personal data to be deleted. In this work, we provide a formal definitional framework for the right to be forgotten using tools and paradigms from cryptography. In particular, we provide a precise definition of what could be (or should be) expected from an entity that collects individuals' data when a request is made of it to delete some of this data. Our framework captures several, though not all, relevant aspects of typical systems involved in data processing. While it cannot be viewed as expressing the statements of current laws (especially since these are rather vague in this respect), our work offers technically precise definitions that represent possibilities for what the law could reasonably expect, and alternatives for what future versions of the law could explicitly require. Finally, with the goal of demonstrating the applicability of our framework and definitions, we consider various natural and simple scenarios where the right to be forgotten comes up. For each of these scenarios, we highlight the pitfalls that arise even in genuine attempts at implementing systems offering deletion guarantees, and also describe technological solutions that provably satisfy our definitions. These solutions bring together techniques built by various communities.

A two-party fair coin-tossing protocol is a coin-tossing protocol that guarantees output to the honest party even when the other party aborts during the protocol execution. Cleve (STOC--1986) demonstrated that, even when the parties are computationally bounded, a fail-stop adversary can alter the output distribution of the honest party by (roughly) $1/r$ (in the statistical distance) in an $r$-message coin-tossing protocol. An optimal fair coin-tossing protocol ensures that no adversary can alter the output distribution beyond $1/r$.

In a seminal result, Moran, Naor, and Segev (TCC--2009) constructed the first optimal fair coin-tossing protocol using oblivious transfer protocols. Whether the existence of oblivious transfer protocols is a necessary computational hardness assumption for optimal fair coin-tossing remains one of the most fundamental open problems in theoretical cryptography. Results of Impagliazzo and Luby (FOCS--1989) and Cleve and Impagliazzo (1993) together imply that the existence of one-way functions is necessary for optimal fair coin-tossing. However, the sufficiency of the existence of one-way functions is not known.

Towards this research endeavor, our work proves a black-box separation of optimal fair coin-tossing from the existence of one-way functions. That is, the black-box use of one-way functions is unlikely to enable optimal fair coin-tossing. Following the standard Impagliazzo and Rudich (STOC--1989) approach, our work considers any $r$-message fair coin-tossing protocol in the random oracle model where the parties have unbounded computational power. We demonstrate a fail-stop attack strategy for one of the parties to alter the output distribution of the honest party by $1/\sqrt{r}$. Our result, therefore, proves that the $r$-message coin-tossing protocol of Blum (COMPCON--1982) and Cleve (STOC--1986), which uses one-way functions in a black-box manner, is qualitatively the best possible protocol.

Several previous works, for example, Dachman--Soled, Lindell, Mahmoody, and Malkin (TCC--2011), Haitner, Omri, and Zarosim (TCC--2013), and Dachman--Soled, Mahmoody, and Malkin (TCC--2014), made partial progress on this research problem by proving this black-box separation assuming some restrictions on the coin-tossing protocol. Our work diverges significantly from these previous approaches to prove this black-box separation in its full generality. The starting point is the recently introduced potential-based inductive proof techniques for demonstrating large gaps in martingales in the information-theoretic plain model. Our technical contribution lies in identifying a global invariant that enables the extension of this technique to the random oracle model.

Network latency is a significant source of inefficiency in interactive protocols. This work contributes towards the possibility of reducing the round complexity and communication complexity of secure computation protocols to a minimum. We introduce the concept of secure non-interactive simulation of joint distributions.

Two parties begin with multiple independent samples from a correlated randomness source. Next, our objective is to investigate what forms of joint distributions can Alice and Bob securely simulate without any further communication. This offline preprocessing step fits perfectly within the offline-online paradigm of secure computation, which enables general secure computation even against parties with unbounded computational power.

One may interpret this concept as imbuing the notion of non-interactive simulation of joint distributions, which initiated from the seminal works of G\'acs and K\"orner (1972), and Wyner (1975), in information theory with cryptographic security. This concept is stronger than merely a secure version of non-interactive correlation distillation as introduced by Mossel, O’Donnell, Regev, Steif, and Sudakov (2004) because secure private keys alone do not suffice to facilitate general secure computation. Alternatively, secure non-interactive simulation is a natural restriction of performing cryptography with one-way communication introduced by Garg, Ishai, Kushilevitz, Ostrovsky, and Sahai (2015), which also serves as a naturally arising base case for inductively building cryptographic primitives with minimum communication complexity.

In this work, we study samples from (1) $\mathsf{BSS}(\epsilon)$, that is the joint distribution $(X,Y)$, where $X$ is a uniform random bit and $Y$ is correlated bit such that $X\neq Y$ with probability $\epsilon\in(0,1/2)$, and (2) $\mathsf{BES}(\epsilon)$, that is the joint distribution $(X,Y)$, where $X$ is a uniform random bit, and $Y=X$ with probability $(1-\epsilon)$; otherwise $Y=\perp$, where $\epsilon\in(0,1)$.

Note that the reverse hypercontractivity and hardness of cryptography with one-way messages both rule out the possibility of realizing any $\mathsf{BES}$ sample from $\mathsf{BSS}$ samples. This impossibility result carries over to our secure non-interactive simulation as well. Furthermore, we prove that it is also impossible to securely and non-interactively simulate samples of $\mathsf{BSS}$ from $\mathsf{BES}$ samples as well. Note that this impossibility result both in the setting of non-interactive simulation and cryptography with one-way communication remains open.

Next, we prove that we can simulate a sample of $\mathsf{BES}(\epsilon')$ from multiple samples of $\mathsf{BES}(\epsilon)$ if and only if $(1-\epsilon')=(1-\epsilon)^k,$ for some $k\in\mathbb{N}$. We proceed by proving that all secure constructions must be linear, and, after that, the rate of the simulation is at most $1/k$.

Finally, we show the existence of securely and non-interactively simulating a sample of $\mathsf{BSS}(\epsilon')$ from $\mathsf{BSS}(\epsilon)$ if and only if $(1-2\epsilon')=(1-2\epsilon)^k,$ for some $k\in\mathbb{N}$. Interestingly, there are linear as well as (comparatively inefficient) non-linear constructions.

We prove a lower bound on the communication complexity of perfect maliciously secure multiparty computation, in the standard model with $n=3t+1$ parties of which $t$ are corrupted. We show that for any $n$ and all large enough $g \in \mathbb{N}$ there exists a Boolean circuit $C$ with $g$ gates, where any perfectly secure protocol implementing $C$ must communicate $\Omega(n g)$ bits. The results easily extends to constructing similar circuits over any fixed finite field. Our results also extend to the case where the threshold $t$ is suboptimal. Namely if $n= 3t+s$ the bound is $\Omega(ng/s)$, which corresponds to known optimizations via packed secret-sharing. Using known techniques, we also show an upper bound that matches the lower bound up to a constant factor (existing upper bounds are a factor $\log n$ off for Boolean circuits).

As IoT applications are increasingly being deployed, there comes along an ever increasing need for the security and privacy of the involved data. Since cryptographic implementations are used to achieve these goals, it is important for embedded software developers to take into consideration hardware attacks. Side Channel Analysis (SCA) and Fault Attacks (FA) are the main classes of such attacks, which can either reduce or even eliminate the security levels of an em-bedded design. Therefore, cryptographic implementations must address both of them at the same time. To this end, multiple solutions have been proposed to address both attacks in one solution, such as Dual Pre-charge Logic (DPL) and Encoding countermeasures. In this work, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the state of the art, concurrent SCA and FA countermeasures. Additionally, we propose a software countermeasure in order to provide protection against both types of attacks. The proposed countermeasure is a general approach, applicable to any byte-sliced cipher and any modern MCUs (32- and 64-bit). The proposed countermeasure is ap-plied to an AES S-BOX implementation, for a 32-bit MCU (ARM Cortex-M3). The countermeasure has been experimen-tally evaluated against Correlation Power Analysis (CPA) attacks for both platforms while its fault detection capabilities are theoretically described.