IACR News
If you have a news item you wish to distribute, they should be sent to the communications secretary. See also the events database for conference announcements.
Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:
11 September 2025
Shihe Ma, Tairong Huang, Anyu Wang, Xiaoyun Wang
Gökçe Düzyol, Kamil Otal
ZK-friendly hash functions, in contrast to the classical cryptographic hash functions, use higher-dimensional MDS matrices over larger finite fields.
In this paper, we examine the applicability of the generalized subfield construction and the possibility of improvements on ZK-friendly hash functions. As a case study, we focus on a recent ZK-friendly hash function Vision Mark-32 presented by Ashur et al. in [IACR Preprint 2024/633]. In particular, instead of using a $24\times 24$ MDS matrix over $\mathbb{F}_{2^{32}}$ for a $24\times 1$ column input over $\{0,1\}^{{32}}$, we suggest separating the $24\times 1$ column input over $\{0,1\}^{{32}}$ into four $24\times 1$ subcolumns over $\{0,1\}^{{8}}$ and then using a $24\times 24$ MDS matrix over $\mathbb{F}_{2^8}$ for each subcolumn. This method still keeps the maximum diffusion property without any compromise and provides simplicity and efficiency. For example, it is possible to significantly decrease the required LUT values to 265 from about 9200 and FF values to 102 from about 4600 for the hardware implementation. We also highlight that we do not need any additional tricks such as NTT for field multiplications.
We also push the theoretical boundaries of the generalized subfield construction to see how much small finite fields we can use, examine the arithmetization complexity, and discuss its applicability to other ZK-friendly hash functions.
10 September 2025
Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen region, Denmark
We are looking for a motivated PhD student to join the Cryptography Group in the Cybersecurity Engineering Section at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science (DTU Compute), located in the Copenhagen region, Denmark.
This fully funded 3-year PhD position, starting on 1 January 2026, will focus on advancing research in Multi-Party Computation and Zero-Knowledge Proofs. The PhD will be carried out under the supervision of Associate Professor Luisa Siniscalchi and the co-supervision of Associate Professor Carsten Baum. Additionally, the student will have the opportunity to spend some months at Chalmers University of Technology, working with Assistant Professor Elena Pagnin.
If you are curious, enthusiastic, and eager to learn, we would love to hear from you, and you can apply at https://lnkd.in/dC3ch5m5, including the following:- A letter motivating the application (cover letter)
- Curriculum vitae
- Grade transcripts and BSc/MSc diploma (in English), including official description of grading scale
Closing date for applications:
Contact: For more information, do not hesitate to contact Luisa Siniscalchi (luisi[at]dtu.dk)
More information: https://lnkd.in/dC3ch5m5
09 September 2025
Virtual event, Anywhere on Earth, 17 November - 20 November 2025
Submission deadline: 10 September 2025
University of Birmingham, School of Computer Science, Birmingham, United Kingdom
We are recruiting for several open positions within the School of Computer Science, including in the area of Cybersecurity, and specifically in (applied) cryptography, implementation security, hardware security, and embedded security. Birmingham's School of Computer Science is ranked 3rd in the UK for research output (according to the national REF exercise).
The role offers opportunities to contribute to teaching as well as pursue their own research agenda. This is a permanent position. For more information, please contact Prof. Elisabeth Oswald. The advert closes at the end of September.
Link to apply: https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOI907/assistant-or-associate-professor-in-computer-science-research-and-education
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Elisabeth Oswald m.e.oswald AT bham.ac.uk
More information: https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOI907/assistant-or-associate-professor-in-computer-science-research-and-education
Graz University of Technology, Austria
Examples of such intersections include:
- All research areas related to the Security, Privacy, and Safety of systems that include or that are based on Machine Learning, Federated Learning, or Generative AI
- All research areas where Machine Learning or Artificial Intelligence is applied to achieve Security, Privacy, or Safety
The new professor will complement the existing strengths in the department and will build an internationally visible group. For this purpose, the position includes a competitive starting package. The sucessful candidate will be an engaged teacher in the Computer Science programs at the Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD level, and will actively participate in academic self-administration. At Graz University of Technology, undergraduate and graduate courses in Computer Science are taught in English.
Please send your application via this link:
https://jobs.tugraz.at/en/jobs/6fa9b0bd-0997-c19d-73dc-683fe309b114/apply
Closing date for applications:
Contact: For further questions, please contact Stefan Mangard (stefan.mangard@tugraz.at) or see the full job description here:
https://jobs.tugraz.at/en/jobs/6fa9b0bd-0997-c19d-73dc-683fe309b114
More information: https://jobs.tugraz.at/en/jobs/6fa9b0bd-0997-c19d-73dc-683fe309b114
Florida Atlantic University, Department of Mathematics and Statistics; Boca Raton, Florida, USA
Strong candidates in all areas of cryptology will be considered. Preference will be given to candidates with several broad areas of interest in the mathematics of cybersecurity including, but not limited to, symmetric and public-key cryptography, post-quantum cryptography, quantum algorithms in cryptography, or a closely related area. Responsibilities for this position will be research, teaching, and professional service. The successful candidate is expected to apply for and secure external research funding, and actively participate in interdisciplinary programs.
The Department of Mathematics & Statistics is a collegial and research-active department demonstrating excellence in teaching, research, and service. We are home to 26 tenure-track or tenured faculty members, 18 faculty members in non-tenure-track positions, and more than 40 graduate teaching/research assistants from diverse backgrounds. Our department has an established national and international reputation for research innovation through our Center for Cryptology and Information Security (CCIS). FAU is also recognized as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance/Cyber Defense Research (CAE-R) since 2019. More information about the department can be found at: http://www.math.fau.edu/
Review of applications will begin November 1, 2025, and will continue until the position is filled.
Minimum Qualifications: Candidates must possess an earned doctorate in mathematics or a closely related discipline at the time of application. Postdoctoral experience is preferred. Candidates should have a strong publication record commensurate with their experience, demonstrated potential for establishing programs of extramurally funded and independent research, and a clear promise of excellent instructional capacity. Candidates should be able to foster and create educational opportunities where all student populations thrive.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Contact: Dr. Stephen C. Locke, Chair of the Search Committee, (lockes@fau.edu).
More information: https://fau.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/FAU/details/Assistant-Professor--Cryptology_REQ20879
University College Cork, Ireland
The PhD students will focus on one of the following topics:
- Quantum Safe Lightweight Cryptography, under the supervision of Dr. Paolo Palmieri
- Security & Protection of AI Algorithms, under the supervision of Dr. Krishnendu Guha
The successful applicant will receive a stipend of €25,000 per year for up to four years (subject to successful annual progress reviews) and an annual contribution towards tuition fees. As part of the project, a travel budget is available to present at international conferences. The hired PhDs will be part of the CyberUnite team, and will also have the opportunity to work with the extensive network of national and international research collaborations of the Security Group.
Deadline: September 15
Recruited students will be expected to start in January 2026.
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Candidates are strongly encouraged to informally contact the supervisor by e-mail before applying: Dr. Paolo Palmieri at p.palmieri@cs.ucc.ie for the post-quantum cryptography project, and Dr. Krishnendu Guha at KGuha@ucc.ie for the AI security project.
More information: https://security.ucc.ie/vacancies.html
05 September 2025
Gilad Asharov, Eliran Eiluz, Ilan Komargodski, Wei-Kai Lin
From a theoretical standpoint, we identify that there is a gap in the literature concerning the asymmetric setting, where the logical word size is asymptotically smaller than the physical memory block size. In this scenario, the best-known construction (OptORAMa, J.\ ACM '23,) turns every logical query into $O(\log N)$ physical memory accesses (quantity known as ``I/O overhead''), whereas the lower bound of Komargodski and Lin (CRYPTO'21) implies that $\Omega(\log N /\log\log N)$ accesses are needed.
We close this gap by constructing an optimal ORAM for the asymmetric setting, achieving an I/O overhead of $O(\log N / \log\log N)$. Our construction features exceptionally small constants (between 1 and 4, depending on the block size) and operates without requiring large local memory. We implement our scheme and compare it to PathORAM (CCS'13) and FutORAMa, demonstrating significant improvement. For 1TB logical memory, our construction obtains $\times 10$-$\times 30$ reduction in I/O overhead and bandwidth compared to PathORAM, and $\times 7$--$\times 26$ improvement over FutORAMa. This improvement applies when those schemes weren't designed to operate on large blocks, as in our settings, and the exact improvement depends on the physical block size and the exact local memory available.
Thomas Schneider, Huan-Chih Wang, Hossein Yalame
We present HE-SecureNet, a novel framework for privacy-preserving model training on encrypted data in a single-client–server setting, using hybrid HE cryptosystems. Unlike prior HE-based solutions, HE-SecureNet supports advanced models such as Convolutional Neural Networks and handles non-linear operations including ReLU, Softmax, and MaxPooling. It introduces a level-aware training strategy that eliminates costly ciphertext level alignment across epochs. Furthermore, HE-SecureNet automatically converts ONNX models into optimized secure C++ training code, enabling seamless integration into privacy-preserving ML pipeline—without requiring cryptographic knowledge.
Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and practicality of our approach. On the Breast Cancer dataset, HE-SecureNet achieves a 5.2× speedup and 33% higher accuracy compared to ConcreteML (Zama) and TenSEAL (OpenMined). On the MNIST dataset, it reduces CNN training latency by 2× relative to Glyph (Lou et al., NeurIPS’20), and cuts communication overhead by up to 66× on MNIST and 42× on CIFAR-10 compared to MPC-based solutions.
MINKA MI NGUIDJOI Thierry Emmanuel
Kaveh Dastouri
Anubhav Baweja, Pratyush Mishra, Tushar Mopuri, Matan Shtepel
We obtain our result by tackling a ubiquitous subproblem in IOPP constructions: checking that a batch of claims hold. Our novel solution to this subproblem is twofold. First, we observe that it is often sufficient to ensure that, with all but negligible probability, most of the claims hold. Next, we devise a new `lossy batching' technique which convinces a verifier of the foregoing promise with lower query complexity than that required to convince it that all the claims hold. This method differs significantly from the line-versus-point test used to achieve query-optimal IOPPs (for quasilinear-time encodable codes) in prior work [Minzer, Zheng; FOCS 2025], and may be of independent interest.
Our IOPP can handle all codes that support efficient codeswitching [Ron-Zewi, Rothblum; JACM 2024], including several linear-time encodable codes. Via standard techniques, our IOPP can be used to construct the first (to the best of our knowledge) IOP for NP with $O(n)$ prover time and $O(\lambda)$ query complexity. We additionally show that our IOPP (and by extension the foregoing IOP) is round-by-round tree-extractable and hence can be used to construct a SNARK in the random oracle model with $O(n)$ prover time and $O(\lambda \log n)$ proof size.
Nakul Khambhati, Joonwon Lee, Gary Song, Rafail Ostrovsky, Sam Kumar
We propose and develop an approach and system called a secure agent and utilize it to create a virtual clean room, Flexroom, that is both performant and flexible. Secure agents enable parties to create a phantom identity that they can collectively control, using maliciously secure MPC, which issues API calls to external services with parameters that remain secret from all participating parties. Importantly, in Flexroom, the secure agent uses MPC not to perform the computation itself, but instead merely to orchestrate the computation in the cloud, acting as a distinct trusted entity jointly governed by all parties. As a result, Flexroom enables collaborative computation with unfettered flexibility, including the ability to use convenient cloud services. By design, the collaborative computation runs at plaintext speeds, so the overhead of Flexroom will be amortized over a long computation.
Ritam Bhaumik, Avijit Dutta, Tetsu Iwata, Ashwin Jha, Kazuhiko Minematsu, Mridul Nandi, Yu Sasaki, Meltem Sönmez Turan, Stefano Tessaro
Yi-Fu Lai, Edoardo Persichetti
Yang Yang, Guomin Yang, Yingjiu Li, Pengfei WU, Rui Shi, Minming Huang, Jian Weng, HweeHwa Pang, Robert H. Deng
A key innovation in PriSrv+ is the development of Fast and Expressive Matchmaking Encryption (FEME), the first matchmaking encryption scheme capable of supporting expressive access control policies with an unbounded attribute universe, allowing any arbitrary string to be used as an attribute. FEME significantly enhances the flexibility of service discovery while ensuring robust message and attribute privacy. Compared to PriSrv, PriSrv+ optimizes cryptographic operations, achieving 7.62$\times$ faster for encryption and 6.23$\times$ faster for decryption, and dramatically reduces ciphertext sizes by 87.33$\%$. In addition, PriSrv+ reduces communication costs by 87.33$\%$ for service broadcast and 86.64$\%$ for anonymous mutual authentication compared with PriSrv. Formal security proofs confirm the security of FEME and PriSrv+. Extensive evaluations on multiple platforms demonstrate that PriSrv+ achieves superior performance, scalability, and efficiency compared to existing state-of-the-art protocols.
Shuiyin Liu, Amin Sakzad
Mahimna Kelkar, Aadityan Ganesh, Aditi Partap, Joseph Bonneau, S. Matthew Weinberg
In this work, we explore combining techniques from cryptography and mechanism design to discourage collusion. We formalize protocols in which colluders submit a cryptographic proof to whistleblow against their co-conspirators, revealing the dishonest behavior publicly. We provide general results on the cryptographic feasibility, and show how whistleblowing fits a number of applications including secret sharing, randomness beacons, and anonymous credentials.
We also introduce smart collusion---a new model for players to collude. Analogous to blockchain smart contracts, smart collusion allows colluding parties to arbitrarily coordinate and impose penalties on defectors (e.g., those that blow the whistle). We show that unconditional security is impossible against smart colluders even when whistleblowing is anonymous and can identify all colluding players. On the positive side, we construct a whistleblowing protocol that requires only a small deposit and can protect against smart collusion even with roughly $t$ times larger deposit.
Shuo Peng, Jiahui He, Kai Hu, Zhongfeng Niu, Shahram Rasoolzadeh, Meiqin Wang
All of our attacks respect security claims made by the designers. Though our analysis does not compromise the security of the full 8-round \chilow, we hope that our results offer valuable insights into its security properties.