International Association for Cryptologic Research

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2015-03-25
15:17 [Pub][ePrint]

In recent years, secure two-party computation (2PC) has been demonstrated to be feasible in practice. However, all efficient general-computation 2PC protocols require multiple rounds of interaction between the two players. This property restricts 2PC to be only relevant to scenarios where both players can be simultaneously online, and where communication latency is not an issue.

This work considers the model of 2PC with a single round of interaction, called Non-Interactive Secure Computation (NISC). In addition to the non-interaction property, we also consider a flavor of NISC that allows reusing the first message for many different 2PC invocations, possibly with different players acting as the player who sends the second message, similar to a public-key encryption where a single public-key can be used to encrypt many different messages.

We present a NISC protocol that is based on the cut-and-choose paradigm of Lindell and Pinkas (Eurocrypt 2007). This protocol achieves concrete efficiency similar to that of best multi-round 2PC protocols based on the cut-and-choose paradigm. The protocol requires only $t$ garbled circuits for achieving cheating probability of $2^{-t}$, similar to the recent result of Lindell (Crypto 2013), but only needs a single round of interaction.

To validate the efficiency of our protocol, we provide a prototype implementation of it and show experiments that confirm its competitiveness with that of the best multi-round 2PC protocols. This is the first prototype implementation of an efficient NISC protocol.

In addition to our NISC protocol, we introduce a new encoding technique that significantly reduces communication in the NISC setting. We further show how our NISC protocol can be improved in the multi-round setting, resulting in a highly efficient constant-round 2PC that is also suitable for pipelined implementation.

11:35 [Event][New]

Submission: 13 July 2015
From January 10 to January 13
Location: Tel Aviv, Israel

10:36 [News]

Starting this year, the IACR is introducing an annual TCC Test-of-Time (ToT) award. The award recognizes outstanding papers, published in TCC at least eight years ago, making a significant contribution to the theory of cryptography, preferably with influence also in other area of cryptography, theory, and beyond. The inaugural 2015 TCC ToT award was announced this week at the TCC business meeting in Warsaw. The winners are Silvio Micali and Leonid Reyzin, for their paper "Physically Observable Cryptography" from TCC 2004. The award committee recognized Micali and Reyzin "for pioneering a mathematical foundation of cryptography in the presence of information leakage in physical systems."

10:23 [News]

Dear members of the IACR

With the spring conference season in full swing, you have certainly noticed a few changes in IACR's workshops and conferences.

Online proceedings

The online proceedings of TCC 2015 and PKC 2015 are now available to members via the IACR online library at http://www.iacr.org/services/springer.php

Based on IACR's arrangement with Springer, we install access for members to conference proceedings as soon as these are available, which is usually a few weeks before the event. We also implement online access to everyone during the time of the conference and this is valid for a few weeks afterwards. Technically, this uses "referer" authorization, where the general chair includes a link to the online proceedings in the conference website.

In that context, recall that all IACR proceedings four years and older are available as "Gold Open Access" (that is, openly from the publisher's online library), and the younger ones are "Green Open Access."

Submission format:

Compared to when IACR started to publish conference proceedings, authors are nowadays formatting the "final" versions of papers almost by themselves; based on common tools and style files, the result also looks much more uniform than 30 years ago. Discussions among authors, program chairs, the Board of Directors, and conference reviewers during 2014 have now resulted in a change to the "traditional" submission format of N pages, 11pt font, and A4/letter size. For EUROCRYPT and CRYPTO in 2015, the LNCS style of the final version has been preferred or even declared mandatory. As could be expected, this change has created some confusion, but we trust that this was just a transition effect.

The Board, as the representative of all IACR members, acknowledges that there should be continuity across IACR publications. A corresponding policy is being worked out right now and should be adopted uniformly by the community. The main reason to format submissions in the same way as the final accepted version is to make transparent to readers, as well as to reviewers, that the published version and the reviewed version correspond to each other in length and scope. However, no bound on "supplementary material" is foreseen and authors are still strongly encouraged to revise and improve their submissions based on the feedback received.

Parallel sessions:

As explained in my news update from September last year, the Board has asked EUROCRYPT, CRYPTO, and ASIACRYPT to organize parallel sessions for a significant part of the program. EUROCRYPT in Sofia will be the first IACR conference with parallel sessions, and I invite you to check out the program on the website. At the end of this year, we will hold a referendum among the IACR membership for deciding whether the format should be kept like this.

Cryptology Schools:

The Board has approved funding for the following IACR Cryptology Schools:

1. SAC Summer School (S3). August 10--12, 2015, Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada. Contact: Orr Dunkelman and Liam Keliher
2. School on Computer-Aided Cryptography: sometime between May 20th and July 10th, 2015, University of Maryland. Contact: Benedikt Schmidt

Closing:

Before I close, let me congratulate Craig Gentry for receiving a MacArthur "genius grant" last year, the first member of our community to receive this prestigious award.

The TCC annual Test of Time (ToT) award was presented for the first time during TCC 2015 this week. This award is given to TCC papers of yore that withstood the test of time. The winners were Silvio Micali and Leonid Reyzin, for their paper "Physically Observable Cryptography" from TCC 2004, receiving the award "for pioneering a mathematical foundation of cryptography in the presence of information leakage in physical systems."

Moreover, TCC has decided to shift its date to fall, and the conference will move there in steps, with TCC 2016 being in January. The Board has recently approved the proposal to hold TCC 2016 in January 2016 in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Best regards,

Christian Cachin, IACR President

2015-03-24
22:33 [Event][New]

Submission: 26 June 2015
From December 15 to December 17
Location: Oxford, United Kingdom

2015-03-23
22:48 [Job][New]

ECRYPT-NET is a European research network that intends to develop advanced cryptographic techniques and implementations for the Internet of Things and the Cloud. The network is currently recruiting a group of 15 PhD students who will be trained in an international context that involves Summer Schools and internships in a company or research organization in a second country. We are looking for highly motivated candidates, ideally with background on cryptology and with proven research abilities.

Two of these PhD students will be based at NXP Semiconductors in Leuven, Belgium. One for research on cryptography for passively powered devices (details: http://ec.europa.eu/euraxess/index.cfm/jobs/jobDetails/33998837) and one for the design of lightweight privacy-preserving authentication mechanisms for the internet of things (details: http://ec.europa.eu/euraxess/index.cfm/jobs/jobDetails/33998833).

NXP Semiconductors is one of the market leaders in providing High Performance Mixed Signal and Standard Product solutions that leverage its leading RF, Analog, PM, Interface, Security, Digital Processing and Manufacturing expertise. NXP’s strong drive for innovation ensures secure identification in a smart connected world. Headquartered in Europe, the company has about 23,000 employees working in more than 25 countries.

The PhD student will, in addition to a supervisor from NXP, be supervised by a member of the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography group (COSIC) at KU Leuven and closely collaborate with PhD students there; COSIC is within biking distance of the NXP site in Leuven. The research of COSIC has led to important cryptographic advances such as the Rijndael algorithm. The goal of the student is to receive a PhD from the KU Leuven after three years.

15:17 [Pub][ePrint]

Many network middleboxes perform deep packet inspection, a set of useful tasks which examine packet payloads. These tasks include intrusion detection (IDS), exfiltration detection, and parental filtering. However, a long-standing issue is that once packets are sent over https, the middleboxes can no longer accomplish their tasks because the payloads are encrypted. Hence, one is faced with choosing at most one of two desirable properties: the functionality of the middleboxes and the privacy of encryption. We propose BlindBox, a novel system that for the first time enables both properties together. The approach of BlindBox is to perform the deep-packet inspection {\\em directly on the encrypted traffic}. We demonstrate how BlindBox enables applications such as IDS, exfiltration detection and parental filtering; BlindBox supports real rulesets from both open source (Snort) DPI systems as well as rulesets from industrial DPI systems. While BlindBox\'s performance is not yet ready for real deployment, BlindBox is nearly practical and improves performance by more than $10^6$ times as compared to a direct application of cryptography.

15:17 [Pub][ePrint]