International Association for Cryptologic Research

# IACR News Central

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2013-07-09
21:17 [Pub][ePrint]

MISTY1 is a block cipher designed by Matsui in 1997. It is widely deployed in Japan where it is an e-government standard, and is recognized internationally as a NESSIE-recommended cipher as well as

an ISO standard and an RFC. Moreover, MISTY1 was selected to be the blueprint on top of which KASUMI, the GSM/3G block cipher, was based. Since its introduction, and especially in recent years, MISTY1 was subjected to extensive cryptanalytic efforts, which resulted in numerous attacks on its reduced variants. Most of these attacks aimed at maximizing the number of attacked rounds, and as a result, their complexities are highly impractical.

In this paper we pursue another direction, by focusing on attacks with a practical time complexity. The best previously-known attacks with practical complexity against MISTY1 could break either 4 rounds (out of 8), or 5 rounds in a modified variant in which some of the FL functions are removed. We present an attack on 5-round MISTY1 with all the FL functions present whose time complexity is 2^38 encryptions. When the FL functions are removed, we present a devastating (and experimentally verified) related-key attack on the full 8-round variant, requiring only 2^18 data and time.

While our attacks clearly do not compromise the security of the full

MISTY1, they expose several weaknesses in MISTY1\'s components, and

improve our understanding of its security. Moreover, future designs which rely on MISTY1 as their base, should take these issues into close consideration.

10:18 [Job][New]

The Deutsche Telekom Chair of Mobile Business & Multilateral Security at Goethe University Frankfurt offers a position of a Scientific Assistant (m/f, E13 TV-G-U). To strengthen our team we are looking for a committed, creative and flexible PhD candidate (male/female) with advanced professional knowledge in Information Technology and interest in the current development in business informatics.

We are looking for people with advanced knowledge and special skills in at least three of the following areas:

- Network and System Security

- Privacy-Enhancing Technologies and data protection

- Identity Management

- Mobile Platforms, Smartcards and Trusted Computing

- Mobile Application Development (e.g. in Android, etc.)

- Cryptography

- Programming languages and experiences in software projects

- Administration skills in different platforms (e.g. UNIX, Linux, Windows)

- Web technologies and development

- Project management

The position is available immediately and has a fixed-term of 3 years with an extension option.

Contact for applications: Prof. Dr. Kai Rannenberg, bewerbungen(at)m-chair(dot)net

Documents recommended to be submitted: personal statement of purpose, current resume, official references, list of publications, official test scores

09:33 [Job][Update]

The Institute of Technology at the University of Washington Tacoma is seeking applications for five full-time, tenure-track Associate/Assistant Professor positions for the Computer Science and Systems program and the Information Technology and Systems program. A Ph.D. or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Information Technology, Information Systems or related field is required. Applicants should have experience in teaching and in externally-funded research. Our priority areas for research are (1) information assurance and cybersecurity – 2 positions, (2) data analytics – AI/intelligent systems, (3) CS theory/algorithms, and (4) spatial data/GIS; other areas will also be considered, especially if they are related to needs of the other Institute of Technology programs. Successful candidates will have demonstrated experience or promise for strong potential in research (as evidenced by publications). Evidence of potential to build strong relationships with partners in the technology industry and in developing collaborative research programs is highly desirable.

Applications should be submitted electronically to https://secure.interfolio.com/apply/21679 and include (1) a cover letter describing academic qualifications and experience for this position, (2) a statement of the candidate’s research program, (3) a list of publications, (4) a description of teaching philosophy, including a list of courses the candidate is qualified to teach, (5) evidence of teaching effectiveness, (6) a curriculum vitae, and (7) at least three letters of reference. Screening of applications will begin on October 15, 2013, and will continue until the positions are filled. Salary is competitive and will be commensurate with experience and qualifications.

09:32 [Event][New]

Submission: 22 July 2013
From October 14 to October 14
Location: Atlanta, United States

09:31 [Event][New]

Submission: 1 September 2013
From October 23 to October 25
Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates

2013-07-07
17:43 [Job][New]

We are seeking for candidates for four funded theses.

The candidates will work on the following topics:

Thesis 1 - Faut and side-channel attacks.

Thesis 2 - Formal proofs of hardware and software implementations.

Thesis 3 - Lightweight cryptography (theory and practice).

Thesis 4 - Embedded equipment securit.

Due to employment visa constraints, the candidates must be of EU citizenship or Swiss.

2013-07-05
18:17 [Pub][ePrint]

In this paper, we first prove beyond-birthyday-bound security for the Misty structure. Specifically, we show that an $r$-round Misty structure is secure against CCA attacks up to $O(2^{\\frac{rn}{r+7}})$ query complexity, where $n$ is the size of each round permutation. So for any $\\epsilon>0$, a sufficient number of rounds would guarantee the security of the Misty structure up to $2^{n(1-\\epsilon)}$ query complexity.

09:01 [Job][New]

The Centre for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT) at the University of Twente invites applications for a Post-Doc position in system security with a strong focus on security of industrial control and SCADA systems.

We search for a candidate with a strong background in practical system level security. The candidate is expected to support supervision of PhD students, contribute to our on-going projects, and also contribute to future project proposals to strengthen our research profile. Our group is member of multiple national and European research projects with strong links to industry. One example is the currently ongoing CRISALIS FP7 project (http://www.crisalisproject.eu/).

Successful candidates must hold a PhD degree in computer science or a closely related discipline and have demonstrated their excellence by top-class publications.

• motivation letter specifically addressing our position,

• full curriculum vitae including a list of all courses and marks,

• publication list incl. a one-page summary of your PhD thesis,

• two recommendation letters (or alternatively the names and email addresses of two references).

The position will be closed as soon as a suitable candidate is found.

2013-07-03
17:22 [Event][New]

Submission: 15 November 2013
From February 20 to February 21
Location: Redmond, USA

11:51 [PhD][Update]

Name: Alexander Meurer
Topic: A Coding-Theoretic Approach to Cryptanalysis
Category:foundations

Description: In this thesis we study the applicability of coding-theoretic algorithms to cryptanalysis and provide new insights into the practical security of different cryptographic primitives. The main results can be summarised as follows:
• We introduce a new generalised framework for the class of "Information Set Decoding" (ISD) algorithms. This class contains all instantiations of the best-known generic decoding algorithms for random linear codes to date.
• By applying the so-called representation technique, we design a new ISD algorithm which asymptotically achieves an exponential improvement over all known methods. Within the generalised ISD framework we provide a rigorous formal proof of superiority of the new algorithm for arbitrary code rates.
• We discuss different practical applications, e.g. we study the security of concrete parameter sets for the McEliece one-way function and we efficiently break all low-noise instances of the "Learning Parities with Noise" (LPN) problem. The main technical contribution of this part is a refined non-asymptotic analysis of the proposed algorithm.
• A new algorithm that allows for error correction in RSA private keys is presented. This algorithms allows to recover the original RSA secret key in polynomial time (w.r.t. the bit length of the modulus) given a noisy copy, i.e. given a copy very every individual bit is independently flipped with (unknown) p[...]

• 10:03 [PhD][New]

Name: Alexander Meurer
Topic: A Coding-Theoretic Approach to Cryptanalysis
Category: foundations

Description: In this thesis we study the applicability of coding-theoretic algorithms to cryptanalysis and provide new insights into the practical security of different cryptographic primitives. We introduce a new generalised framework for the class of \"Information Set Decoding\" (ISD) algorithms. By applying the so-called representation technique, we design a new ISD algorithm which asymptotically achieves an exponential improvement over all known methods. Within the generalised ISD framework we provide a rigorous formal proof of superiority of the new algorithm for arbitrary code rates 0[...]