International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Event date: 9 February to 13 February 2026
Submission deadline: 15 January 2026

The Symmetric Cryptography Group at TU Wien, which is part of the Security and Privacy research unit, invites applications for a fully funded PhD position in provable symmetric cryptography. The Security and Privacy research unit at TU Wien is internationally recognized for its research in cryptography, security, and privacy. The working language of the group is English.

Candidate Profile

Applicants must meet the following criteria:

• A completed Master’s or Diploma degree in Computer Science and/or Mathematics.
• Formal exposure to cryptography, evidenced by the successful completion of at least one university-level cryptography course.
• A clear and well-motivated interest in conducting research at the intersection of Arithmetization-Oriented cryptography and classical symmetric cryptography.

Preference will be given to candidates with knowledge of basic provable security, including standard security notions and proof techniques.

Application Deadline: February 20

Documents: human-generated 1. Letter of Motivation (1 p. max), 2. Detailed CV, 3. Degree Certificates and Transcripts, 4. Recommendation Letter/s, 5. Master’s Thesis (or Abstract), and publication list (if applicable).

Reviews will be on a rolling basis, thus early applications are strongly encouraged.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: elena (dot) andreeva (at) tuwien (dot) at

We invite applications for a PhD position in applied cryptography, with a focus on designing and analyzing cryptographic protocols that offer strong, provable security guarantees. The role provides the opportunity to work on cutting‑edge research emphasizing efficiency and scalability in real‑world deployments.

Key Responsibilities:

• Conduct innovative research in applied cryptography and information security, with strong foundations in cryptography and a particular interest in provable security, MPC, and privacy‑preserving computation.
• Develop secure and privacy‑preserving protocols with rigorous security proofs.
• Support and assist in teaching courses on computer security and cryptography.

Required Qualifications:

• MSc degree (or equivalent) in Computer Science, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Strong background in cryptography and mathematics.
• Solid programming skills.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Prof. Katerina Mitrokotsa, [email protected]
Deadline: 15 February 2026
Submission of applications: online (https://career.hrsuite.unisg.ch/mein-portal/mein-lebenslauf-fuer-meine-bewerbung-fuer-phd-position-in-applied-cryptography-and-privacy-preserving-computation-)

More information: https://jobs.unisg.ch/offene-stellen/phd-position-in-applied-cryptography-and-privacy-preserving-computation-m-w-d/6c682dbd-b33c-4956-b130-7dc7e3890574

The Department of Computer Science at the Technical University of Darmstadt and the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE is establishing an ATHENE Research Group in Real-World Cryptography. We are looking for outstanding candidates to become an ATHENE Early Career Fellow and provide generous funding for establishing an independent research group.

The ATHENE Research Group will closely collaborate with researchers within ATHENE and the Cybersecurity and Privacy research field at the Technical University of Darmstadt. We are seeking for candidates in all areas of applied cryptographic research, including (but not limited to):

• Cryptographic protocols, including blockchains and zero-knowledge proof systems
• Symmetric cryptography
• Security of cryptographic implementations
• Formal methods for real-world cryptography
• Post-quantum cryptography
• Cryptography for privacy
• AI for Cryptography / Cryptography for AI

Candidates must have a completed a PhD in Computer Science or related area, an outstanding publication record, and a demonstrated experience in working with the international research community. The application documents (CV, PhD certificate, publication list, motivation letter, research and teaching statement) should be submitted latest by February 28, 2026 via the following link: https://www.career.tu-darmstadt.de/tu-darmstadt/apply/52139.

The short-listed candidates will then participate in the selection process at the Department of Computer Science. The Research Group is funded by ATHENE initially for 3 years with an extension for additional 3 years upon positive evaluation. For additional information, please contact Sebastian Faust (sebastian.faust (at) tu-darmstadt (dot) de).

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Sebastian Faust (sebastian.faust (at) tu-darmstadt (dot) de).

More information: https://www.career.tu-darmstadt.de/tu-darmstadt/job/52139

The Information Security Group at the University of Kassel is looking for motivated candidates for a PhD position.

About the Position:

• It will be funded for 3 years.
• The candidate will do research on (password-based) key exchange protocols and related primitives (such as public-key encryption and digital signatures).
• It is expected to publish research results at major conferences in cryptography and IT security, such as Crypto, Eurocrypt, Asiacrypt, ACM CCS, etc..
• In addition, the candidate will support the teaching activities of the group.
• Funding is available for conference travel and research stays.

Your Profile:

We are looking for a highly motivated candidate with:

• A master’s degree (or equivalent) in Computer Science, Mathematics, or other related fields. We encourage candidates who will finish their master degree in 2026 to apply.
• A strong background in public-key cryptography and provable security or abstract algebra.
• Prior knowledge in any of the relevant areas is highly desirable, including key exchange protocols, lattices, isogenies, quantum random oracle techniques, and tight security proofs.
• Very good English proficiency (German is not required but beneficial).
• The ability to work independently and as part of a team.

Starting Date: As soon as possible. The starting date is negotiable, provided it is within 2026.

Interested?

Please send the following documents to me via email ([email protected]) until (including) 26 February 2026:

1. A motivation letter (that describes your research interests and why you would like to work with our group)
2. A curriculum vitae
3. Academic transcripts and certificates
4. Contact details of 1–2 academic referees (At least one should be your thesis supervisor)

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Jiaxin Pan

We have two internship positions: (1) Practical Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) protocols for AI, Communication and Multimedia, (2) Privacy-preserving fuzzy protocols for biometric-based authentication. In general, we are looking for practical people interested in applications of MPC and FHE. Some knowledge of AI would be a plus, but it's not necessary. The positions in Antwerp (Belgium) with the duration of 3 to 5 months depending on your conditions.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Emad Heydari Beni ([email protected])

The position is part of the Quantum-Resistant Cryptography in Practice (QARC) project, funded by the Horizon Europe programme. The work will involve cryptographic design and analysis to support secure, practical implementations for real-world quantum-resistant cryptography. The main application topics will be cryptographic voting, secure cloud storage and eGovernment services. Of particular interest will be hybrid schemes and cryptographic agility. There will also be a need to do further theory work, e.g. on QROM and related techniques.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Kristian Gjøsteen ([email protected])

More information: https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/292244/postdoctoral-fellow-in-quantum-safe-cryptography

Information Security and Machine Learning Lab (https://ai-security.github.io/index_e.htm) has conducted research in a range of areas including artificial intelligence, cyber security and cryptography. We are also extending our areas to emerging areas such as quantum computing and parallel computing. Post-doctoral research fellows are welcome from computer science/engineering, electric/electronics, and mathematics/statistics. Applicants with good high-impact conference/journal publication records are encouraged to send their CVs, publication records and research statement to Professor Seong Oun Hwang (seongoun.hwang at gmail.com) by February 28, 2026.

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Prof. Seong Oun Hwang

More information: https://ai-security.github.io/index_e.htm

Event date: 27 October to 30 October 2026
Submission deadline: 28 February 2026
Notification: 28 April 2026

Event date: 10 May 2026
Submission deadline: 1 February 2026
Notification: 22 March 2026

Event date: 10 May 2026
Submission deadline: 23 January 2026

Event date: 26 June 2026

Event date: 10 August to 14 August 2026
Submission deadline: 30 April 2026
Notification: 5 June 2026

Event date: 3 June to 5 June 2026
Submission deadline: 1 March 2026
Notification: 30 April 2026

Event date: 2 February to 5 February 2026
Submission deadline: 19 January 2026

Event date: 15 September to 17 September 2026

We propose Asymmetric Robust Threshold ECDSA (ART-ECDSA), a robust and hardware-friendly threshold ECDSA protocol designed for asymmetric settings where one participant is a resource-constrained hardware device. The scheme achieves full robustness and cheater identification while minimizing the computational and communication burden on the hardware signer. Our design leverages Castagnos–Laguillaumie (CL) homomorphic encryption to replace Paillier-based operations and remove costly range proofs, yielding compact ciphertexts and simple zero-knowledge proofs. All heavy multiparty computations, including multiplicative-to-additive (MtA) conversions and distributed randomness generation, are offloaded to online cosigners, allowing the hardware party to remain lightweight. ART-ECDSA provides an efficient asymmetric signing protocol with formal security proofs in the UC framework, achieving both robustness and hardware efficiency within a single design. Our implementation on an ARM Cortex-M7 microcontroller (400 MHz, 3 MB Flash, 2 MB SRAM) shows that the hardware party performs only lightweight computation (50 ms in presigning and ≤ 10 s in signing) and transmits about 300 Bytes and 3 KB in each phase, which easily fits within the bandwidth limits of BLE and NFC. These results demonstrate that ART-ECDSA is practical for cold-storage and embedded hardware environments without compromising security.

As quantum computing continues to advance, traditional public-key cryptosystems face increasing vulnerability, necessitating a global transition toward post-quantum cryptography (PQC). A primary challenge for both cryptographers and system architects is the efficient integration of PQC into high-performance computing platforms. ARM, a dominant processor architecture, has recently introduced ARMv9-A to accelerate modern workloads such as artificial intelligence and cloud computing. Leveraging its Scalable Vector Extension 2 (SVE2) and Scalable Matrix Extension (SME), ARMv9-A provides sophisticated hardware support for high-performance computing. This architectural evolution motivates the need for efficient implementations of PQC schemes on the new architecture. In this work, we present a highly optimized implementation of ML-KEM, the post-quantum key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) standardized by NIST as FIPS 203, on the ARMv9-A architecture. We redesign the polynomial computation pipeline to achieve deep alignment with the vector and matrix execution units. Our optimizations encompass refined modular arithmetic and highly vectorized polynomial operations. Specifically, we propose two NTT variants tailored to the architectural features of SVE2 and SME: the vector-based NTT (VecNTT) and the matrix-based NTT (MatNTT), which effectively utilize layer fusion and optimized data access patterns. Experimental results on the Apple M4 Pro processor demonstrate that VecNTT and MatNTT achieve performance improvements of up to $7.18\times$ and $7.77\times$, respectively, compared to the reference implementation. Furthermore, the matrix-vector polynomial multiplication, which is the primary computational bottleneck of ML-KEM, is accelerated by up to $5.27\times$. Our full ML-KEM implementation achieves a 52.47% to 60.09% speedup in key encapsulation across all security levels. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to implement and evaluate ML-KEM leveraging SVE2 and SME on real ARMv9-A hardware, providing a practical foundation for future PQC deployments on next-generation ARM platforms.

Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) allows secure communication without relying on computational assumptions, but can currently only be deployed over relatively short distances due to hardware constraints. To extend QKD over long distances, networks of trusted repeater nodes can be used, wherein QKD is executed between neighbouring nodes and messages between non-neighbouring nodes are forwarded using a relay protocol. Although these networks are being deployed worldwide, no protocol exists which provides provable guarantees of integrity against manipulation from both external adversaries and corrupted intermediates. In this work, we present the first protocol that provably provides both confidentiality and integrity. Our protocol combines an existing cryptographic technique, Algebraic Manipulation Detection (AMD) codes, with multi-path relaying over trusted repeater networks. This protocol achieves Information-Theoretic Security (ITS) against the detection of manipulation, which we prove formally through a sequence of games.

We present the first practical, round-optimal blind signatures in pairing-free groups. We build on the Fischlin paradigm (EUROCRYPT 2007) where a first signature is computed on a commitment to the message and the final signature is a zero-knowledge proof of the first signature. We use the Nyberg-Rueppel signature scheme as the basis (CCS 1993), it is a well-studied scheme with a verification equation that is sufficiently algebraic to allow efficient proofs, that do not need to make non-black box use of a random oracle. Our construction offers flexibility for trade-offs between underlying assumptions and supports issuance of signatures on vectors of attributes making it suitable for use in anonymous credential systems. As a building block, we show how existing NIZKs can be modified to allow for straight-line extraction. We implement variants of our construction to demonstrate its practicality, varying the choice of elliptic curve and the proof system used to compute the NIZK. With conservative parameters (NIST-P256 and SHA-256) and targeting short proofs, signatures are 1349 bytes long, and on a typical laptop can be generated in under 500ms and verified in under 100ms.