IACR News
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05 June 2025
Nicholas Brandt, Miguel Cueto Noval, Christoph U. Günther, Akin Ünal, Stella Wohnig
We solve this problem by constructing a prefix-constrained verifiable PRF that does not rely on the aforementioned assumptions. Essentially, our construction is a verifiable version of the Goldreich-Goldwasser-Micali PRF. To achieve verifiability we leverage degree-2 algebraic PRGs and bilinear groups. In short, proofs consist of intermediate values of the Goldreich-Goldwasser-Micali PRF raised to the exponents of group elements. These outputs can be verified using pairings since the underlying PRG is of degree 2.
We prove the selective security of our construction under the Decisional Square Diffie-Hellman (DSDH) assumption and a new assumption, which we dub recursive Decisional Diffie-Hellman (recursive DDH).
We prove the soundness of recursive DDH in the generic group model assuming the hardness of the Multivariate Quadratic (MQ) problem and a new variant thereof, which we call MQ+.
Last, in terms of applications, we observe that our CVRF is also an exponent (C)VRF in the plain model. Exponent VRFs were recently introduced by Boneh et al. (Eurocrypt’25) with various applications to threshold cryptography in mind. In addition to that, we give further applications for prefix-CVRFs in the blockchain setting, namely, stake-pooling and compressible randomness beacons.
Hien Chu, Khue Do, Lucjan Hanzlik, Sri AravindaKrishnan Thyagarajan
To address these limitations, we explore a threshold-based approach to distribute trust among multiple recipients, preventing adversaries from decrypting anamorphic messages even if some recipients are compromised. Our first contribution is the formalization of the notion of \emph{threshold-recipient anamorphic signatures}, where decryption is possible only through collaboration among a subset of recipients.
We then explore a \emph{stronger model} where the dictator controls the key generation process through which it learns all secret keys and how citizens store cryptographic keys. A particular example of this model in the real world is a dictator providing citizens with electronic identity documents (eIDs) and blocking all other usage of cryptography. We demonstrate that anamorphic communication is still possible even in such a scenario. Our construction is secure against post-quantum adversaries and does not rely on any computational assumptions except the random oracle model.
Finally, we show an \emph{impossibility result} for encoding anamorphic messages with a threshold-sender model when using many existing threshold signature schemes and the adversary is part of the signing group. Our work outlines both the possibilities and limitations of extending anamorphic signatures with threshold cryptography, offering new insights into improving the security and privacy of individuals under authoritarian regimes.
Alessandro Annechini, Alessandro Barenghi, Gerardo Pelosi, Simone Perriello
Calvin Abou Haidar, Quentin Payet, Mehdi Tibouchi
Falcon's Gaussian sampler is the core component of its security, as it allows to provably decorrelate the short basis used for signing and the generated signatures. Other schemes, lacking this guarantee (such as NTRUSign, GGH or more recently Peregrine) were proven insecure. However, performing efficient and secure lattice Gaussian sampling has proved to be a difficult task, fraught with numerous potential vulnerabilities to be exploited. To avoid timing attacks, a common technique is to use distribution tables that are traversed to output a sample. The official Falcon implementation uses this technique, employing a hardcoded reverse cumulative distribution table (RCDT). Using Rowhammer, we target Falcon's RCDT to trigger a very small number of targeted bit flips, and prove that the resulting distribution is sufficiently skewed to perform a key recovery attack.
Namely, we show that a single targeted bit flip suffices to fully recover the signing key, given a few hundred million signatures, with more bit flips enabling key recovery with fewer signatures. Interestingly, the Nguyen–Regev parallelepiped learning attack that broke NTRUSign, GGH and Peregrine does not readily adapt to this setting unless the number of bit flips is very large. However, we show that combining it with principal component analysis (PCA) yields a practical attack.
This vulnerability can also be triggered with other types of persistent fault attacks on memory like optical faults. We suggest cheap countermeasures that largely mitigate it, including rejecting signatures that are unusually short.
Linghe Yang, Jian Liu, Jingyi Cui, Guangquan Xu, Yude Bai, Wei Wang
Mahdi Soleimani, Grace Jia, Anurag Khandelwal
We present Weave, an efficient, expressive, and secure analytics platform that scales to large datasets. Weaveemploys a combination of noise injection and hardware memory isolation via enclave page caches to reduce the network and compute overheads for oblivious analytics to a constant factor. Weave also employs several optimizations and extensions that exploit dataset and workload-specific properties to ensure performance at scale without compromising on functionality. Our evaluations show that Weave reduces the end-to-end execution time for a wide range of analytics jobs on large real-world datasets by $4$--$10\times$ compared to prior state-of-the-art while providing strong obliviousness guarantees.
Hoeteck Wee, David J. Wu
* We obtain a distributed broadcast encryption scheme where the size of the public parameters, user public/secret keys, and ciphertexts are optimal (i.e., have size $\mathsf{poly}(\lambda, \log N)$). Security relies on the $\mathsf{poly}(\lambda, \log N)$-succinct LWE assumption. Previously, this was only known from indistinguishability obfuscation or witness encryption. All constructions that did not rely on these general tools could only support an a priori bounded number of users.
* We obtain a key-policy registered ABE scheme that supports arbitrary bounded-depth Boolean circuit policies from the $\mathsf{poly}(\lambda, d, \log N)$-succinct LWE assumption in the random oracle model, where $d$ is the depth of the circuit computing the policy. The public parameters, user public/secret keys, and ciphertexts have size $\mathsf{poly}(\lambda, d, \log N)$, which are optimal up to the $\mathsf{poly}(d)$ factor. This is the first registered ABE scheme with nearly-optimal parameters. All previous schemes (including constructions based on indistinguishability obfuscation, witness encryption, or evasive LWE) either have ciphertexts that scale with the policy size and attribute length, or can only support a bounded number of users (with long public parameters and public keys that scale with the number of users).
Tejas Sharma, Ashish Kundu
Yunqing Sun, Hanlin Liu, Kang Yang, Yu Yu, Xiao Wang, Chenkai Weng
To achieve the best efficiency, we design a tailored commitment scheme and matching C-VOLE protocols, both based on the learning parity with noise assumption. In particular, exploiting the structures of the carefully designed LPN-based commitment minimizes the cost of ensuring consistency between the committed vector and VOLE correlation. As a result, we achieve a 28$\times$ improvement over the protocol proposed in prior work (Usenix 2021) that uses ZKP to prove the correct opening of the commitment. We also apply C-VOLE to design a PSI protocol that allows one server to run PSI repeatedly with multiple clients while ensuring that the same set is used across all executions. Compared with the state-of-the-art PSI (CCS 2024) with similar security requirements, our protocol reduces the communication overhead by a factor of 35$\times$.
Mingyu Gao, Hongren Zheng
Benedikt Auerbach, Miguel Cueto Noval, Boran Erol, Krzysztof Pietrzak
Unfortunately, this process destroys the binary tree structure as the tree gets pruned and some nodes must be ``blanked'' at the cost of increasing the in-degree of others, which makes the commit operation, as well as, future commits more costly. In the worst case, the update cost (in terms of uploaded ciphertexts) per user can grow from $\log(N)$ to $\Omega(N)$.
In this work we provide two main contributions. First, we show that MLS' communication complexity is bad not only in the worst case but also if the proposers and committers are chosen at random: even if there's just one update proposal for every commit the expected cost is already over $\sqrt{N}$, and it approaches $N$ as this ratio changes towards more proposals.
Our second contribution is a new variant of propose and commit for TreeKEM which for moderate amounts of update proposals per commit provably achieves an update cost of $\Theta(\log(N))$ assuming the proposers and committers are chosen at random.
Liangrong Zhao, Hans Schmiedel, Qin Wang, Jiangshan Yu
In this paper, we further progress the BKR paradigm by presenting Janus, the first hybrid ACS protocol leveraging trusted hardware components. Janus is the first ACS protocol that tolerates a minority of Byzantine processes and that has O(n^2) message complexity. Supported by trusted hardware components, we introduce a provable broadcast primitive to replace RBC, and develop a resilient binary agreement protocol. Messages for concurrent instances of agreement are aggregated into vectors. Our experimental results demonstrate significant performance improvements over predominant ACS constructions with a 92%+ increase compared to HoneyBadgerBFT and a 47%+ increase compared to BEAT. Additionally, we provide a comparison with open-source hybrid BFT protocols that operate under a partially synchronous network, highlighting the performance enhancement compared to previous hybrid protocols that also tolerate the Byzantine minority (e.g., MinBFT and Damysus, by 49%+).
Liangrong Zhao, Jérémie Decouchant, Joseph K. Liu, Qinghua Lu, Jiangshan Yu
04 June 2025
Junru Li, Yifan Song
Without fully homomorphic encryptions, the best-known result in this setting is achieved by Coretti, Garay, Hirt, and Zikas (ASIACRYPT 2016), which requires $O(|C|n^3\kappa)$ bits of communication assuming one-way functions, where $\kappa$ is the security parameter. On the other hand, the best-known non-constant-round AMPC by Goyal, Liu, and Song (CRYPTO 2024) can achieve $O(|C|n)$ communication even in the information-theoretic setting. In this work, we give the first construction of a constant-round AMPC with $O(|C|n\kappa)$ bits of communication that achieves malicious security with abort assuming random oracles. We provide new techniques for adapting the MPC-in-the-head framework in the asynchronous network to compute a constant-size garbled circuit.
Chengcheng Chang, Meiqin Wang, Wei Wang, Kai Hu
Input-Output Global
Cryptographic Engineers contribute to design, implementation, and integration of secure cryptographic protocols across Cardano-related initiatives, including Cardano Core Cryptographic Primitives, Mithril, ALBA, Leios, etc. This role bridges applied research and engineering, focusing on translating cutting-edge cryptographic designs into robust, production-grade systems. The cryptography engineer will collaborate closely with researchers, protocol designers, software architects, product managers, and QA teams to ensure cryptographic correctness, performance, and system alignment. A strong emphasis is placed on high assurance coding, cryptographic soundness, and practical deployment readiness.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Marios Nicolaides
More information: https://apply.workable.com/io-global/j/70FC5D8A0C/
03 June 2025
Rutchathon Chairattana-Apirom, Nico Döttling, Anna Lysyanskaya, Stefano Tessaro
In this work, we present the first construction of \emph{everlasting} anonymous rate-limited tokens, for which unlinkability holds against computationally unbounded adversaries, whereas other security properties (e.g., unforgeability) remain computational. Our construction relies on pairings. While several parameters in our construction unavoidably grow with $k$, the key challenge we resolve is ensuring that the complexity of dispensing a token is independent of the parameter $k$.
We are motivated here by the goal of providing solutions that are robust to potential future quantum attacks against the anonymity of previously stored tokens. A construction based on post-quantum secure assumptions (e.g., based on lattices) would be rather inefficient---instead, we take a pragmatic approach dispensing with post-quantum security for properties not related to privacy.
Shuo Peng, Kai Hu, Jiahui He, Meiqin Wang
Matilda Backendal, David Balbás, Miro Haller
We propose to move away from static keys and instead use a group key progression (GKP) scheme, a novel primitive that enables a dynamic group of users to agree on a persistent sequence of keys while keeping a compact local state. GKP ensures that group members can only derive keys within a certain interval of the sequence, a notion that we call interval access control (IAC), and also provide post-compromise security. Our GKP construction, called Grappa, combines continuous group key agreement (CGKA, by Alwen et al., 2020) with a new abstraction called interval scheme. The latter is a symmetric-key primitive that can derive a sequence of keys from a compact state while preserving IAC. We explore different interval scheme constructions and simulate their storage and communication costs when used in group settings. The most efficient of them is a generalization of dual key regression (Shafagh et al., 2020), which we formalize and prove secure. Overall, our protocols offer a practical and robust solution to protect persistent data shared by a group.
Andrew Huang, Yael Tauman Kalai
We also prove a similar result for three-message private-coin arguments. Previously, Bostanci, Qian, Spooner, and Yuen (STOC 2024) proved such a parallel repetition result in the more general setting of quantum protocols, where the verifier and communication may be quantum. We consider only protocols where the verifier is classical, but obtain a simplified analysis, and for the more general setting of threshold verifiers.