The integration of AI agents with Web3 ecosystems harnesses their complementary potential for autonomy and openness, yet also introduces underexplored security risks, as these agents dynamically interact with financial protocols and immutable smart contracts. This paper investigates the vulnerabilities of AI agents within blockchain-based financial ecosystems when exposed to adversarial threats in real-world scenarios. We introduce the concept of context manipulation -- a comprehensive...

We introduce deniable secret sharing (DSS), which, analogously to deniable encryption, enables shareholders to produce fake shares that are consistent with a target “fake message”, regardless of the original secret. In contrast to deniable encryption, in a DSS scheme an adversary sees multiple shares, some of which might be real, and some fake. This makes DSS a more difficult task, especially in situations where the fake shares need to be generated by individual shareholders, without...

In this paper, we present a ring referral scheme, by which a user can publicly prove her knowledge of a valid signature for a private message that is signed by one of an ad hoc set of authorized issuers, without revealing the signing issuer. Ring referral is a natural extension to traditional ring signature by allowing a prover to obtain a signature from a third-party signer. Our scheme is useful for diverse applications, such as certificate-hiding decentralized identity, privacy-enhancing...

Since the introduction of TLS 1.3, which includes X25519 and X448 as key exchange algorithms, one could expect that high efficient implementations for these two algorithms become important as the need for power efficient and secure IoT devices increases. Assembly optimised X25519 implementations for low end processors such as Cortex-M4 have existed for some time but there has only been scarce progress on optimised X448 implementations for low end ARM processors such as Cortex-M4 and...

Solitary output secure computation allows a set of mutually distrustful parties to compute a function of their inputs such that only a designated party obtains the output. Such computations should satisfy various security properties such as correctness, privacy, independence of inputs, and even guaranteed output delivery. We are interested in full security, which captures all of these properties. Solitary output secure computation has been the study of many papers in recent years, as it...

Following work of Mazur-Tate and Satoh, we extend the definition of division polynomials to arbitrary isogenies of elliptic curves, including those whose kernels do not sum to the identity. In analogy to the classical case of division polynomials for multiplication-by-n, we demonstrate recurrence relations, identities relating to classical elliptic functions, the chain rule describing relationships between division polynomials on source and target curve, and generalizations to higher...

Side-channel attacks pose significant threats to cryptographic implementations, which require the inclusion of countermeasures to mitigate these attacks. In this work, we study the masking of state-of-the-art post-quantum signatures based on the MPC-in-the-head paradigm. More precisely, we focus on the recent threshold-computation-in-the-head (TCitH) framework that applies to some NIST candidates of the post-quantum standardization process. We first provide an analysis of side-channel attack...

Efficiently protecting embedded software implementations of standard symmetric cryptographic primitives against side-channel attacks has been shown to be a considerable challenge in practice. This is, in part, due to the most natural countermeasure for such ciphers, namely Boolean masking, not amplifying security well in the absence of sufficient physical noise in the measurements. So-called prime-field masking has been demonstrated to provide improved theoretical guarantees in this context,...

A secret-sharing scheme is a method by which a dealer distributes shares to parties such that only authorized subsets of parties can reconstruct the secret. Secret-sharing schemes are an important tool in cryptography and they are used as a building block in many secure protocols, e.g., secure multiparty computation protocols for arbitrary functionalities, Byzantine agreement, threshold cryptography, access control, attribute-based encryption, and weighted cryptography (e.g., stake-based...

We revisit the question of minimizing the proof length of designated-verifier succinct non-interactive arguments (dv-SNARGs) in the generic group model. Barta et al. (Crypto 2020) constructed such dv-SNARGs with inverse-polynomial soundness in which the proof consists of only two group elements. For negligible soundness, all previous constructions required a super-constant number of group elements. We show that one group element suffices for negligible soundness. Concretely, we obtain...

Group actions have emerged as a powerful framework in post-quantum cryptography, serving as the foundation for various cryptographic primitives. The Lattice Isomorphism Problem (LIP) has recently gained attention as a promising hardness assumption for designing quantum-resistant protocols. Its formulation as a group action has opened the door to new cryptographic applications, including a commitment scheme and a linkable ring signatures. In this work, we analyze the security properties of...

Sigma protocols ($\Sigma$-protocols) provide a foundational paradigm for constructing secure algorithms in privacy-preserving applications. To enhance efficiency, several extended models [BG18], [BBB+18], [AC20] incorporating various optimization techniques have been proposed as ``replacements'' for the original $\Sigma$-protocol. However, these models often lack the expressiveness needed to handle complex relations and hinder designers from applying appropriate instantiation and...

We present a unifying framework for proving the knowledge-soundness of KZG-like polynomial commitment schemes, encompassing both univariate and multivariate variants. By conceptualizing the proof technique of Lipmaa, Parisella, and Siim for the univariate KZG scheme (EUROCRYPT 2024), we present tools and falsifiable hardness assumptions that permit black-box extraction of the multivariate KZG scheme. Central to our approach is the notion of a canonical Proof-of-Knowledge of a Polynomial...

This paper formalizes the notion of server-aided anonymous credentials (SAACs), a new model for anonymous credentials (ACs) where, in the process of showing a credential, the holder is helped by additional auxiliary information generated in an earlier (anonymous) interaction with the issuer. This model enables lightweight instantiations of 'publicly verifiable and multi-use' ACs from pairing-free elliptic curves, which is important for compliance with existing national standards. A recent...

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in Galois/Counter Mode (GCM) delivers both confidentiality and integrity yet poses performance and security challenges on resource-limited microcontrollers. In this paper, we present an optimized AES-GCM implementation for the ARM Cortex-M4 that combines Fixslicing AES with the FACE (Fast AES-CTR Encryption) strategy, significantly reducing redundant computations in AES-CTR. We further examine two GHASH implementations—a 4-bit Table-based approach and a...

Single Sign-On (SSO) is a popular authentication mechanism enabling users to access multiple web services with a single set of credentials. Despite its convenience, SSO faces outstanding privacy challenges. The Identity Provider (IdP) represents a single point of failure and can track users across different Relying Parties (RPs). Multiple colluding RPs may track users through common identity attributes. In response, anonymous credential-based SSO solutions have emerged to offer...

Federated Learning (FL) has recently emerged as one of the leading paradigms for collaborative machine learning, serving as a tool for model computation without a need to expose one’s privately stored data. However, despite its advantages, FL systems face severe challenges within its own security solutions that address both privacy and robustness of models. This paper focuses on vulnerabilities within the domain of FL security with emphasis on model-robustness. Identifying critical gaps in...

We present almost-optimal lattice-based attribute-based encryption (ABE) and laconic function evaluation (LFE). For depth d circuits over $\ell$-bit inputs, we obtain * key-policy (KP) and ciphertext-policy (CP) ABE schemes with ciphertext, secret key and public key size $O(1)$; * LFE with ciphertext size $\ell + O(1)$ as well as CRS and digest size $O(1)$; where O(·) hides poly(d, λ) factors. The parameter sizes are optimal, up to the poly(d) dependencies. The security of our...

In this work, we study the communication complexity of constant-round secure multiparty computation (MPC) against a fully malicious adversary and consider both the honest majority setting and the dishonest majority setting. In the (strong) honest majority setting (where $t=(1/2-\epsilon)n$ for a constant $\epsilon$), the best-known result without relying on FHE is given by Beck et al. (CCS 2023) based on the LPN assumption that achieves $O(|C|\kappa)$ communication, where $\kappa$ is the...

Zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs have been recently explored for the integrity of machine learning (ML) inference. However, these protocols suffer from high computational overhead, with the primary bottleneck stemming from the evaluation of non-linear functions. In this paper, we propose the first systematic ZK proof framework for non-linear mathematical functions in ML using the perspective of table lookup. The key challenge is that table lookup cannot be directly applied to non-linear functions...

The Estonian i-voting experience is probably the richest to analyze; a country that is considered a pioneer in digitizing both the government and private sector since 2001, and hence digital voting in 2005, yet there are still some complaints submitted, critics and remarks to consider about the IVXV system. In this paper, we introduce a Systemization of Knowledge of the Estonian IVXV i-voting system and propose some added security enhancements. The presented SoK includes applications...

We describe a strategy for a nation to acquire majority stake in Bitcoin with zero cost to the taxpayers of the nation. We propose a bitcoin fork sponsored by the the government of the nation, and backed by the full faith of treasury of the nation, such that the genesis block of this fork attributes fixed large amount of new kinds of tokens called strategic-reserve-bitcoin tokens (SRBTC) to the nation's treasury, which is some multiple (greater than one) of the amount of all Bitcoin tokens...

A secret sharing scheme starts with a secret and then derives from it certain shares (or shadows) which are distributed to users. The secret may be recovered only by certain predetermined groups. In case of compartmented secret sharing, the set of users is partitioned into compartments and the secret can be recovered only if the number of participants from any compartment is greater than or equal to a fixed compartment threshold and the total number of participants is greater...

This work introduce a new approach called Max bias analysis for the entropy computation of structures of Free Ring Oscillator-based Physical Random Number Generator. It employs the stochastic model based on the well-established Wiener process, specifically adapted to only capture thermal noise contributions while accounting for potential non-zero bias in the duty cycle. Our analysis is versatile, applicable to combinations of multiple sampled Ring Oscillator (RO) filtering by any function....

Registration-based encryption (RBE) is a recently developed alternative to identity-based encryption, that mitigates the well-known key-escrow problem by letting each user sample its own key pair. In RBE, the key authority is substituted by a key curator, a completely transparent entity whose only job is to reliably aggregate users' keys. However, one limitation of all known RBE scheme is that they all rely on one-time trusted setup, that must be computed honestly. In this work,...

Due to their simple security assessments, permutation-based pseudo-random functions (PRFs) have become widely used in cryptography. It has been shown that PRFs using a single $n$-bit permutation achieve $n/2$ bits of security, while those using two permutation calls provide $2n/3$ bits of security in the classical setting. This paper studies the security of permutation-based PRFs within the Q1 model, where attackers are restricted to classical queries and offline quantum computations. We...

DNA edit distance (ED) measures the minimum number of single nucleotide insertions, substitutions, or deletions required to convert a DNA sequence into another. ED has broad applications in healthcare such as sequence alignment, genome assembly, functional annotation, and drug discovery. Privacy-preserving computation is essential in this context to protect sensitive genomic data. Nonetheless, the existing secure DNA edit distance solutions lack efficiency when handling large data sequences...

Side-channel analysis (SCA) is a growing field in hardware security where adversaries extract secret information from embedded devices by measuring physical observables like power consumption and electromagnetic emanation. SCA is a security assessment method used by governmental labs, standardization bodies, and researchers, where testing is not just limited to standardized cryptographic circuits, but it is expanded to AI accelerators, Post Quantum circuits, systems, etc. Despite its...

In this paper we provide new theoretical and empirical evidences that gradient-based deep learning profiling attacks (DL-SCA) suffer from masking schemes. This occurs through an initial stall of the learning process: the so-called plateau effect. To understand why, we derive an analytical expression of a DL-SCA model targeting simulated traces which enables us to study an analytical expression of the loss. By studying the loss landscape of this model, we show that not only do the magnitudes...

Scloud+ is an unstructured LWE-based key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) with conservative quantum security, in which ternary secrets and lattice coding are incorporated for higher computational and communication efficiency. However, its efficiencies are still much inferior to those of the structured LWE-based KEM, like ML-KEM (standardized by NIST). In this paper, we present a configurable hardware architecture for Scloud+.KEM to improve the computational efficiency. Many algorithmic and...

Recently, Differential Fault Attacks (DFAs) have proven highly effective against stream ciphers designed for Hybrid Homomorphic Encryption (HHE). In this work, we present a table-based DFA framework called the \textit{shortcut attack}, which generalizes the attack proposed by Wang and Tang on the cipher \textsf{Elisabeth}. The framework applies to a broad sub-family of ciphers following the Group Filter Permutator (GFP) paradigm and enhances previous DFAs by improving both the fault...

We show that the aggregate signature scheme [IEEE Syst. J., 2023, 17(3), 3822-3833] is insecure against forgery attack. This flaw is due to that the ephemeral key or ephemeral value chosen in the signing phase is not indeed bound to the final signature. An adversary can sign any message while the verifier cannot find the fraud. We also suggest a revising method to frustrate this attack.

Side-channel vulnerabilities pose an increasing threat to cryptographically protected devices. Consequently, it is crucial to observe information leakages through physical parameters such as power consumption and electromagnetic (EM) radiation to reduce susceptibility during interactions with cryptographic functions. EM side-channel attacks are becoming more prevalent. PRESENT is a promising lightweight cryptographic algorithm expected to be incorporated into Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices...

The Chou-Orlandi batch oblivious transfer (OT) protocol is a particularly attractive OT protocol that bridges the gap between practical efficiency and strong security guarantees and is especially notable due to its simplicity. The security analysis provided by Chou and Orlandi bases the security of their protocol on the hardness of the computational Diffie-Hellman ($\mathsf{CDH}$) problem in prime-order groups. Concretely, in groups in which no better-than-generic algorithms are known for...

Hyperledger Fabric is a unique permissioned platform for implementing blockchain in a consortium. It has a distinct transaction flow of execute-order-validate. During the execution phase, a pre-determined set of endorsing peers execute a transaction and sign the transaction response. This process is termed endorsement. In the validation phase, peers validate the transaction with reference to an endorsement policy. The identity of the endorsing organizations is obtainable to all the nodes in...

The emergence of video streams as a primary medium for communication and the demand for high-quality video sharing over the internet have given rise to several security and privacy issues, such as unauthorized access and data breaches. To address these limitations, various Selective Video Encryption (SVE) schemes have been proposed, which encrypt specific portions of a video while leaving others unencrypted. The SVE approach balances security and usability, granting unauthorized users access...

We revisit the problem of secure aggregation of high-dimensional vectors in a two-server system such as Prio. These systems are typically used to aggregate vectors such as gradients in private federated learning, where the aggregate itself is protected via noise addition to ensure differential privacy. Existing approaches require communication scaling with the dimensionality, and thus limit the dimensionality of vectors one can efficiently process in this setup. We propose PREAMBLE:...

Black-box separations are a cornerstone of cryptography, indicating barriers to various goals. A recent line of work has explored black-box separations for quantum cryptographic primitives. Namely, a number of separations are known in the Common Haar Random State (CHRS) model, though this model is not considered a complete separation, but rather a starting point. A few very recent works have attempted to lift these separations to a unitary separation, which are considered complete...

In the realm of fully homomorphic encryption on the torus, we investigate the algebraic manipulations essential for handling polynomials within cyclotomic rings characterized by prime power indices. This includes operations such as modulo reduction, computation of the trace operator, extraction, and the blind rotation integral to the bootstrapping procedure, all of which we reformulate within this mathematical framework.

Multi-party computation (MPC) has become increasingly practical in the last two decades, solving privacy and security issues in various domains, such as healthcare, finance, and machine learning. One big caveat is that MPC sometimes lacks usability since the knowledge barrier for regular users can be high. Users have to deal with, e.g., various CLI tools, private networks, and sometimes even must install many dependencies, which are often hardware-dependent. A solution to improve the...

One-shot signatures (OSS) were defined by Amos, Georgiou, Kiayias, and Zhandry (STOC'20). These allow for signing exactly one message, after which the signing key self-destructs, preventing a second message from ever being signed. While such an object is impossible classically, Amos et al observe that OSS may be possible using quantum signing keys by leveraging the no-cloning principle. OSS has since become an important conceptual tool with many applications in decentralized settings and for...

McEliece cryptosystems, based on code-based cryptography, is a candidate in Round 4 of NIST's post-quantum cryptography standardization process. The QC-MDPC (quasi-cyclic moderate-density parity-check) variant is particularly noteworthy due to its small key length. The Guo-Johansson-Stankovski (GJS) attack against the QC-MDPC McEliece cryptosystem was recently proposed and has intensively been studied. This attack reconstructs the secret key using information on decoding error rate (DER)....

Hardware obfuscation is an active trustworthy design technique targeting threats in the IC supply chain, such as IP piracy and overproduction. Recent research on Intellectual Property (IP) protection technologies suggests that using embedded reconfigurable components (e.g., eFPGA redaction) could be a promising approach to hide the functional and structural information of security-critical designs. However, such techniques suffer from almost prohibitive overhead in terms of area, power,...

We show the first threshold blind signature scheme and threshold Oblivious PRF (OPRF) scheme which remain secure in the presence of an adaptive adversary, who can adaptively decide which parties to corrupt throughout the lifetime of the scheme. Moreover, our adaptively secure schemes preserve the minimal round complexity and add only a small computational overhead over prior solutions that offered security only for a much less realistic static adversary, who must choose the subset of...

A sequential aggregate signature scheme (SAS) allows multiple potential signers to sequentially aggregate their respective signatures into a single compact signature. Typically, verification of a SAS signatures requires access to all messages and public key pairs utilized in the aggregate generation. However, efficiency is crucial for cryptographic protocols to facilitate their practical implementation. To this end, we propose a sequential aggregate signature scheme with lazy verification...

Key Exchange mechanisms (KE or KEMs) such as the Diffie-Hellman protocol have proved to be a cornerstone conciliating the efficiency of symmetric encryption and the practicality of public key primitives. Such designs however assume the non-compromission of the long term asymmetric key in use. To relax this strong security assumption, and allow for modern security features such as Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) or Post Compromise Security (PCS), Ratcheted-KE (RKE) have been proposed. ...

This paper presents a systematic study of module lattices. We extend the lattice enumeration algorithm from Euclidean lattices to module lattices, providing a generalized framework. To incorporate the refined analysis by Hanrot and Stehlè (CRYPTO'07), we adapt key definitions from Euclidean lattices, such as HKZ-reduced bases and quasi-HKZ-reduced bases, adapting them to the pseudo-basis of modules. Furthermore, we revisit the lattice profile, a crucial aspect of enumeration...

Shor's and Grover's algorithms' efficiency and the advancement of quantum computers imply that the cryptography used until now to protect one's privacy is potentially vulnerable to retrospective decryption, also known as harvest now, decrypt later attack in the near future. This dissertation proposes an overview of the cryptographic schemes used by Tor, highlighting the non-quantum-resistant ones and introducing theoretical performance assessment methods of a local Tor network. The...

In this paper, we revisit the question of key recovery using side-channel analysis for unrolled, single-cycle block ciphers. In particular, we study the Princev2 cipher. While it has been shown vulnerable in multiple previous studies, those studies were performed on side-channel friendly ASICs or older FPGAs (e.g., Xilinx Virtex II on the SASEBO-G board), and using mostly expensive equipment. We start with the goal of exploiting a cheap modern FPGA and board using power traces from a cheap...

This short note explains how the Tate pairing can be used to efficiently sample torsion points with precise requirements, and other applications. These applications are most clearly explained on Montgomery curves, using the Tate pairing of degree 2, but hold more generally for any degree or abelian variety, or even generalized Tate pairings. This note is explanatory in nature; it does not contain new results, but aims to provide a clear and concise explanation of results in the literature...

We show that the threshold signature scheme [J. Ind. Inf. Integr. 39: 100593 (2024)] is insecure against forgery attack. An adversary can find an efficient signing algorithm functionally equivalent to the valid signing algorithm, so as to convert the legitimate signature $(sig, s, r_x)$ of message $m$ into a valid signature $(sig, s, r_x')$ of any message $m'$.

In this paper, we introduce $\mathsf{HammR}$, a generic Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) protocol demonstrating knowledge of a secret vector that has a fixed Hamming weight with entries taken from a shifted multiplicative group. As special cases, we are able to directly apply this protocol to restricted vectors and to rank-1 vectors, which are vectors with entries that lie in a dimension one subspace of $\mathbb{F}_q$. We show that these proofs can be batched with low computational...

The most fundamental performance metrics of secure multi-party computation (MPC) protocols are related to the number of messages the parties exchange (i.e., round complexity), the size of these messages (i.e., communication complexity), and the overall computational resources required to execute the protocol (i.e., computational complexity). Another quality metric of MPC protocols is related to the black-box or non-black-box use of the underlying cryptographic primitives. Indeed, the design...

The rapid growth of cloud computing and data-driven applications has amplified privacy concerns, driven by the increasing demand to process sensitive data securely. Homomorphic encryption (HE) has become a vital solution for addressing these concerns by enabling computations on encrypted data without revealing its contents. This paper provides a comprehensive evaluation of two leading HE libraries, SEAL and OpenFHE, examining their performance, usability, and support for prominent HE schemes...

The Sum of Even-Mansour (SoEM) construction, proposed by Chen et al. at Crypto 2019, has become the basis for designing some symmetric schemes, such as the nonce-based MAC scheme $\text{nEHtM}_{p}$ and the nonce-based encryption scheme $\text{CENCPP}^{\ast}$. In this paper, we make the first attempt to study the quantum security of SoEM under the Q1 model where the targeted encryption oracle can only respond to classical queries rather than quantum ones. Firstly, we propose a quantum...

This tutorial provides a practical introduction to Deep Learning-based Side-Channel Analysis (DLSCA), a powerful approach for evaluating the security of cryptographic implementations. Leveraging publicly available datasets and a Google Colab service, we guide readers through the fundamental steps of DLSCA, offering clear explanations and code snippets. We focus on the core DLSCA framework, providing references for more advanced techniques, and address the growing interest in this field...

Deniable authentication allows Alice to authenticate a message to Bob, while retaining deniability towards third parties. In particular, not even Bob can convince a third party that Alice authenticated that message. Clearly, in this setting Bob should not be considered trustworthy. Furthermore, deniable authentication is necessary for deniable key exchange, as explicitly desired by Signal and off-the-record (OTR) messaging. In this work we focus on (publicly verifiable) designated...

Chat groups in secure messaging applications such as Signal, Telegram, and Whatsapp are nowadays used for rapid and widespread dissemination of information to large groups of people. This is common even in sensitive contexts, associated with the organisation of protests, activist groups, and internal company dialogues. Manual administration of who has access to such groups quickly becomes infeasible, in the presence of hundreds or thousands of members. We construct a practical,...

Efficient implementation of a pairing-based cryptosystem relies on high-performance arithmetic in finite fields $\mathbb{F}_{p}$ and their extensions $\mathbb{F}_{p^k}$, where $k$ is the embedding degree. A small embedding degree is crucial because part of the arithmetic for pairing computation occurs in $\mathbb{F}_{{p}^k}$ and includes operations such as squaring, multiplication, and Frobenius operations. In this paper, we present a fast and efficient method for computing the Frobenius...

We show that using a polynomial representation of prime field elements (PMNS) can be relevant for real-world cryptographic applications even in terms of performance. More specifically, we consider elliptic curves for cryptography when pseudo-Mersenne primes cannot be used to define the base field (e.g. Brainpool standardized curves, JubJub curves in the zkSNARK context, pairing-friendly curves). All these primitives make massive use of the Montgomery reduction algorithm and well-known...

This study explores the algebraic cryptanalysis of small-scale variants of the E0 stream cipher, a legacy cipher used in the Bluetooth protocol. By systematically reducing the size of the linear feedback shift registers (LFSRs) while preserving the cipher’s core structure, we investigate the relationship between the number of unknowns and the number of consecutive keystream bits required to recover the internal states of the LFSRs. Our work demonstrates an approximately linear relationship...

In the interconnected global financial system, anti-money laundering (AML) and combating the financing of terrorism (CFT) regulations are indispensable for safeguarding financial integrity. However, while illicit transactions constitute only a small fraction of overall financial activities, traditional AML/CFT frameworks impose uniform compliance burdens on all users, resulting in inefficiencies, transaction delays, and privacy concerns. These issues stem from the institution-centric...

Poly1305 is a widely-deployed polynomial hash function. The rationale behind its design was laid out in a series of papers by Bernstein, the last of which dates back to 2005. As computer architectures evolved, some of its design features became less relevant, but implementers found new ways of exploiting these features to boost its performance. However, would we still converge to this same design if we started afresh with today's computer architectures and applications? To answer this...

This paper examines the deployment of Multi-Party Computation (MPC) in corporate data processing environments, focusing on its legal and technical implications under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). By combining expertise in cryptography and legal analysis, we address critical questions necessary for assessing the suitability of MPC for real-world applications. Our legal evaluation explores the conditions under which MPC qualifies as an anonymizing approach...

The key collision attack was proposed as an open problem in key-committing security in Authenticated Encryption (AE) schemes like $\texttt{AES-GCM}$ and $\texttt{ChaCha20Poly1305}$. In ASIACRYPT 2024, Taiyama et al. introduce a novel type of key collision—target-plaintext key collision ($\texttt{TPKC}$) for $\texttt{AES}$. Depending on whether the plaintext is fixed, $\texttt{TPKC}$ can be divided into $\texttt{fixed-TPKC}$ and $\texttt{free-TPKC}$, which can be directly converted into...

Shuffles are used in electronic voting in much the same way physical ballot boxes are used in paper systems: (encrypted) ballots are input into the shuffle and (encrypted) ballots are output in a random order, thereby breaking the link between voter identities and ballots. To guarantee that no ballots are added, omitted or altered, zero-knowledge proofs, called proofs of shuffle, are used to provide publicly verifiable transcripts that prove that the outputs are a re-encrypted permutation of...

Generative models have achieved remarkable success in a wide range of applications. Training such models using proprietary data from multiple parties has been studied in the realm of federated learning. Yet recent studies showed that reconstruction of authentic training data can be achieved in such settings. On the other hand, multiparty computation (MPC) guarantees standard data privacy, yet scales poorly for training generative models. In this paper, we focus on improving...

We revisit the privacy and security analyses of FIDO2, a widely deployed standard for passwordless authentication on the Web. We discuss previous works and conclude that each of them has at least one of the following limitations: (i) impractical trusted setup assumptions, (ii) security models that are inadequate in light of state of the art of practical attacks, (iii) not analyzing FIDO2 as a whole, especially for its privacy guarantees. Our work addresses these gaps and proposes...

In this work we revisit the post-quantum security of KEM-based password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE), specifically that of (O)CAKE. So far, these schemes evaded a security proof considering quantum adversaries. We give a detailed analysis of why this is the case, determining the missing proof techniques. To this end, we first provide a proof of security in the post-quantum setting, up to a single gap. This proof already turns out to be technically involved, requiring advanced techniques...

In this paper, we propose a new 10-bit S-box generated from a Feistel construction. The subpermutations are generated by a 5-cell cellular automaton based on a unique well-chosen rule and bijective affine transformations. In particular, the cellular automaton rule is chosen based on empirical tests of its ability to generate good pseudorandom output on a ring cellular automaton. Similarly, Feistel's network layout is based on empirical data regarding the quality of the output S-box. We...

We propose a post-quantum certificateless encryption scheme based on a web of trust instead of a centralized Key Generation Center. Our scheme allows nodes to communicate securely. It is the nodes already present in the network that vote on the acceptance of new nodes, and agree on the shared key. The threshold required for the acceptance of a new node is configurable. Our protocol thus allows to completely operate without the Key Generation Center (or Key Distribution Center). Our scheme...

Fault attacks pose a significant threat to cryptographic implementations, motivating the development of countermeasures, primarily based on a combination of redundancy and masking techniques. Redundancy, in these countermeasures, is often implemented via duplication or linear codes. However, their inherent structure remains susceptible to strategic fault injections bypassing error checks. To address this, the CAPA countermeasure from CRYPTO 2018 leveraged information-theoretic MAC tags for...

Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is one of the most widely used and extensively studied encryption algorithms globally, which is renowned for its efficiency and robust resistance to attacks. In this paper, three quantum circuits are designed to implement the S-box, which is the sole nonlinear component in AES. By incorporating a linear key schedule, we achieve a quantum circuit for implementing AES with the minimum number of qubits used. As a consequence, only 264/328/398 qubits are needed...

Privacy-preserving distributed computation enables a resource-limited client to securely delegate computations on sensitive data to multiple servers by distributing shares of the data. In such systems, verifiable secret sharing (VSS) is a fundamental component, ensuring secure data distribution and directly impacting the overall performance. The most practical approach to construct VSS is through polynomial commitment (PC), with two main research directions to improve the VSS efficiency....

Presenting a protocol that builds a cryptographic solution which shifts security responsibility from the cipher designer to the cipher user. The Polar Lattice is a pattern-devoid cryptographic cipher. It is based on a geometric construct -- a polar lattice, on which the letters of a plaintext alphabet A, are presented as two points each letter, so that to transmit a letter the transmitter transmits a randomized pathway, a trail, (ciphertext) that begins at the first point of the transmitted...

We describe, formally model, and prove the security of Telegram's key exchange protocols for client-server communications. To achieve this, we develop a suitable multi-stage key exchange security model along with pseudocode descriptions of the Telegram protocols that are based on analysis of Telegram's specifications and client source code. We carefully document how our descriptions differ from reality and justify our modelling choices. Our security proofs reduce the security of the...

Cryptographic schemes often contain verification steps that are essential for security. Yet, faulty implementations missing these steps can easily go unnoticed, as the schemes might still function correctly. A prominent instance of such a verification step is the re-encryption check in the Fujisaki-Okamoto (FO) transform that plays a prominent role in the post-quantum key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) considered in NIST's PQC standardization process. In KEMs built from FO, decapsulation...

Oblivious permutation (OP) enables two parties, a sender with a private data vector $x$ and a receiver with a private permutation π, to securely obtain the shares of π(x). OP has been used to construct many important MPC primitives and applications such as secret shuffle, oblivious sorting, private set operations, secure database analysis, and privacy-preserving machine learning. Due to its high complexity, OP has become a performance bottleneck in several practical applications, and many...

Matrix multiplication of two encrypted matrices (CC-MM) is a key challenge for privacy-preserving machine learning applications. As modern machine learning models focus on scalability, fast CC-MM on large datasets is increasingly in demand. In this work, we present a CC-MM algorithm for large matrices. The algorithm consists of plaintext matrix multiplications (PP-MM) and ciphertext matrix transpose algorithms (C-MT). We propose a fast C-MT algorithm, which is computationally inexpensive...

We consider the question of protecting a general computation device, modeled by a stateful Boolean circuit, against leakage of partial information about its internal wires. Goyal et al. (FOCS 2016) obtained a solution for the case of bounded-communication leakage, where the wires are partitioned into two parts and the leakage can be any function computed using $t$ bits of communication between the parts. However, this solution suffers from two major limitations: (1) it only applies to a...

In verifiable secret sharing (VSS), a dealer shares a secret input among several parties, ensuring each share is verifiable. Motivated by its applications in the blockchain space, we focus on a VSS where parties holding shares are not allowed to reconstruct the dealer's secret (even partially) on their own terms, which we address as privacy-targeted collusion if attempted. In this context, our work investigates mechanisms deterring such collusion in VSS among rational and malicious...

P vs NP problem is the most important unresolved problem in the field of computational complexity. Its impact has penetrated into all aspects of algorithm design, especially in the field of cryptography. The security of cryptographic algorithms based on short keys depends on whether P is equal to NP. In fact, Shannon strictly proved that the one-time-pad system meets unconditional security, but because the one-time-pad system requires the length...

State-of-the-art protocols that achieve constant-round secure multiparty computation currently present a trade-off: either consume an amount of communication that scales quadratically in the number of parties, or achieve better asymptotics at the cost of high constant factors (e.g. schemes based on LPN or DDH). We construct a constant-round MPC protocol where communication scales linearly in the number of parties n. Our construction relies only on OT and RO, and it leverages packed...

Practical signature-based witness encryption (SWE) schemes recently emerged as a viable alternative to instantiate timed-release cryptography in the honest majority setting. In particular, assuming threshold trust in a set of parties that release signatures at a specified time, one can ``encrypt to the future'' using an SWE scheme. Applications of SWE schemes include voting, auctions, distributed randomness beacons, and more. However, the lack of homomorphism in existing SWE schemes reduces...

A major challenge in cryptography is the construction of succinct garbling schemes that have asymptotically smaller size than Yao’s garbled circuit construction. We present a new framework for succinct garbling that replaces the heavy machinery of most previous constructions by lighter-weight homomorphic secret sharing techniques. Concretely, we achieve 1-bit-per-gate (amortized) garbling size for Boolean circuits under circular variants of standard assumptions in composite-order or...

Every cryptographic implementation on embedded device is vulnerable to side-channel attacks. To prevent these attacks, the main countermeasure consists in splitting each sensitive variable in shares and processing them independently. With the upcoming of new algorithms designed to resist quantum computers and the complexity of their operations, this protection represents a real challenge. In this article, we present an attack on an earlier attempt to protect the decoder of BIKE...

We introduce the use of machine learning in the cryptanalysis of code-based cryptography. Our focus is on distinguishing problems related to the security of NIST round-4 McEliece-like cryptosystems, particularly for Goppa codes used in ClassicMcEliece and Quasi-Cyclic Moderate Density Parity-Check (QC-MDPC) codes used in BIKE. We present DeepDistinguisher, a new algorithm for distinguishing structured codes from random linear codes that uses a transformer. The results show that the new...

In this paper, we study preimage resistance of the SHA-3 standard. We propose a squeeze meet-in-the-middle attack as a new preimage attack method for the sponge functions. This attack combines the squeeze attack and meet-in-the-middle attack, and is implemented by internal differentials. We analyze the inverse operation of the SHA-3 round function, and develop a new target internal differential algorithm as well as a linearization technique for the Sbox in the backward phase. In addition, we...

Presenting a novel use of encryption, not for hiding a secret, but for marking letters. Given a 2n letters plaintext, the transmitter encrypts the first n letters with key K1 to generate corresponding n cipherletters, and encrypts the second n letters with key K2 to generate n corresponding cipherletters. The transmitter sends the 2n cipherletters along with the keys, K1 and K2 The recipient (and any interceptor) will readily decrypt the 2n cipherletters to the original plaintext. This...

ChaCha is a widely deployed stream cipher and one of the most important symmetric primitives. Due to this practical importance, many cryptanalysis have been proposed. Until now, Probabilistic Neutral Bits (PNBs) have been the most successful. Given differential-linear distinguishers, PNBs are the technique for key recovery relying on an experimental backward correlation obtained through blackbox analysis. A careful theoretical analysis exploiting the round function design may find a better...

This paper introduces a new one-more computational problem for lattice-based cryptography, which we refer to as the Algebraic One-More MISIS problem, or AOM-MISIS for short. It is a modification of the AOM-MLWE problem recently introduced by Espitau et al. (CRYPTO ’24) to prove security of new two-round threshold signatures. Our first main result establishes that the hardness of AOM-MISIS is implied by the hardness of MSIS and MLWE (with suitable parameters), both of which are standard...

This note discusses the problem of writing cryptographic implementations in software, free of timing-based side-channels, and many ways in which that endeavour can fail in practice. It is a pessimist view: it highlights why such failures are expected to become more common, and how constant-time coding is, or will soon become, infeasible in all generality.

In this paper, we propose a new type of non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK), called Fine-grained Verifier NIZK (FV-NIZK), which provides more flexible and more fine-grained verifiability of proofs than standard NIZK that supports public verifiability and designated-verifier NIZK (DV-NIZK) that supports private verifiability. FV-NIZK has two statistically (or computationally) equivalent verification approaches: --- a master verification using the master secret key $msk$; --- a...

Logic locking has surfaced as a notable safeguard against diverse hazards that pose a risk to the integrated circuit (IC) supply chain. Existing literature on logic locking largely encompasses the art of proposing new constructions, on the one hand, and unearthing weaknesses in such algorithms on the other. Somehow, in this race of make and break, the stress on automation of adopting such techniques on real-life circuits has been rather limited. For the first time, we present a...

Non-malleable zero-knowledge (NMZK), originally introduced in the seminal work of Dolev, Dwork, and Naor (STOC 91), is a fundamental concept for modeling the security of proof systems against man-in-the-middle attacks. Recently, Kim, Liang, and Pandey (CRYPTO 2022) presented the first efficient constant-round NMZK argument system based solely on symmetric-key cryptography. Their construction relies on a non-black-box use of the involved cryptographic primitives and on multiple...

Recently, Jiang et al. (EUROCRYPT 2025) proposed a universal framework for constructing commitment schemes using group actions, and instantiated it with the Lattice Isomorphism Problem (LIP). This paper attempts to construct an instantiation based on module-LIP with this framework. More precisely, we first present a reduction from $\mathcal{O}_{\mathbb{L}}^2$-LIP to $\mathcal{O}_{\mathbb{L}}^2$-LAP. Then we develop a re-randomized algorithm based on the self-reduction framework of Module-LIP...

Anonymous tokens with private metadata bit (ATPM) have received increased interest as a method for anonymous client authentication while also embedding trust signals that are only readable by the authority who holds the issuance secret key and nobody else. A drawback of all existing ATPM constructions is that they require client-issuer interaction during the issuance process. In this work, we build the first non-interactive anonymous tokens (NIAT) with private metadata bit, inspired by the...

Bootstrapping in approximate homomorphic encryption involves evaluating the modular reduction function. Traditional methods decompose the modular reduction function into three components: scaled cosine, double-angle formula, and inverse sine. While these approaches offer a strong trade-off between computational cost and level consumption, they lack flexibility in parameterization. In this work, we propose a new method to decompose the modular reduction function with improved...

In this paper, we analyze the subtle issues of complexity estimates related to state-of-the-art cryptanalytic efforts on ChaCha. In this regard, we demonstrate that the currently best-known cryptanalytic result on $7$-round ChaCha with time $2^{189.7}$ and data $2^{102.63}$ [Xu et al., ToSC 2024] can be estimated as $2^{178.12}$ for time and $2^{101.09}$ for data complexity. We improve the best-known result for the $7.25$ round by obtaining an improved set of Probabilistic Neutral Bits and...

We explore advanced security notions for threshold signature schemes, focusing on Beyond UnForgeability Features (BUFF), introduced by Cremers et al. (S&P’21) in the non-threshold setting. The BUFF properties protect against attacks based on maliciously chosen keys, e.g., expropriating a message-signature pair under a new public key (called exclusive ownership). We first formalize these notions in the threshold setting and examine their relationships. Notably, unlike regular signature...