Communications in Cryptology IACR CiC


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Editors in chief
Policy on publication ethics Communications in Cryptology (CiC) is committed to ensuring ethics and quality in research. We therefore expect everyone involved in the journal to follow our principles (see below) and ethics. See the related IACR docs here and here. Duties for Authors Confidentiality You may not ask Editorial Board members for information about your submission befor...
Editors in chief
Policy on irregular submissions The Communications in Cryptology (CiC) Policy on Irregular Submissions is based on the IACR policy for irregular submissions. Scope Simultaneous submission of substantially similar papers to multiple venues, resubmis­sion of previously published work, and plagiarism of content, are a serious breach of authors’ ethical obligations to the CiC and the e...
Editors in chief
Frequently asked questions The International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) Communications in Cryptology (CiC) was approved by the Membership in the IACR 2022 election and targets publications that advance the field, but with a broader range of contributions than the ones accepted by the IACR flagship or area conferences. What are the main principles of CiC? Low-cost open ...
Ritam Bhaumik, André Chailloux, Paul Frixons, Bart Mennink, María Naya-Plasencia
Published 2024-10-07 PDFPDF

In order to maintain a similar security level in a post-quantum setting, many symmetric primitives should have to double their keys and increase their state sizes. So far, no generic way for doing this is known that would provide convincing quantum security guarantees. In this paper we propose a new generic construction, QuEME, that allows one to double the key and the state size of a block cipher in such a way that a decent level of quantum security is guaranteed. The QuEME design is inspired by the ECB-Mix-ECB (EME) construction, but is defined for a different choice of mixing function than what we have seen before, in order to withstand a new quantum superposition attack that we introduce as a side result: this quantum superposition attack exhibits a periodic property found in collisions and breaks EME and a large class of its variants. We prove that QuEME achieves n-bit security in the classical setting, where n is the block size of the underlying block cipher, and at least (n/6)-bit security in the quantum setting. We finally propose a concrete instantiation of this construction, called Double-AES, that is built with variants of the standardized AES-128 block cipher.

Nilanjan Datta, Avijit Dutta, Eik List, Sougata Mandal
Published 2024-07-08 PDFPDF

There has been a notable surge of research on leakage-resilient authenticated encryption (AE) schemes, in the bounded as well as the unbounded leakage model. The latter has garnered significant attention due to its detailed and practical orientation. Designers have commonly utilized (tweakable) block ciphers, exemplified by the TEDT scheme, achieving $\mathcal{O}(n-\log(n^2))$-bit integrity under leakage and comparable AE security in the black-box setting. However, the privacy of TEDT was limited by $n/2$-bits under leakage; TEDT2 sought to overcome these limitations by achieving improved security with $\mathcal{O}(n-\log n)$-bit integrity and privacy under leakage.

This work introduces FEDT, an efficient leakage-resilient authenticated encryption (AE) scheme based on fork-cipher. Compared to the state-of-the-art schemes TEDT and TEDT2, which process messages with a rate of $1/2$ block per primitive call for encryption and one for authentication, FEDT doubles their rates at the price of a different primitive. FEDT employs a more parallelizable tree-based encryption compared to its predecessors while maintaining $\mathcal{O}(n-\log n)$-bit security for both privacy and integrity under leakage. FEDT prioritizes high throughput at the cost of increased latency. For settings where latency is important, we propose FEDT*, which combines the authentication part of FEDT with a CTR-based encryption. FEDT* offers security equivalent to FEDT while increasing the encryption rate of $4/3$ and reducing the latency.

Thomas Pornin
Published 2024-04-09 PDFPDF

This paper describes a generic methodology for obtaining unified, and then complete formulas for a prime-order group abstraction homomorphic to a subgroup of an elliptic curve with even order. The method is applicable to any curve with even order, in finite fields of both even and odd characteristic; it is most efficient on curves with order equal to 2 modulo 4, dubbed "double-odd curves". In large characteristic fields, we obtain doubling formulas with cost as low as 1M + 5S, and the resulting group allows building schemes such as signatures that outperform existing fast solutions, e.g. Ed25519. In binary fields, the obtained formulas are not only complete but also faster than previously known incomplete formulas; we can sign and verify in as low as 18k and 27k cycles on x86 CPUs, respectively.

Shahla Atapoor, Karim Baghery, Hilder V. L. Pereira, Jannik Spiessens
Published 2024-04-09 PDFPDF

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is a prevalent cryptographic primitive that allows for computation on encrypted data. In various cryptographic protocols, this enables outsourcing computation to a third party while retaining the privacy of the inputs to the computation. However, these schemes make an honest-but-curious assumption about the adversary. Previous work has tried to remove this assumption by combining FHE with Verifiable Computation (VC). Recent work has increased the flexibility of this approach by introducing integrity checks for homomorphic computations over rings. However, efficient FHE for circuits of large multiplicative depth also requires non-ring computations called maintenance operations, i.e. modswitching and keyswitching, which cannot be efficiently verified by existing constructions. We propose the first efficiently verifiable FHE scheme that allows for arbitrary depth homomorphic circuits by utilizing the double-CRT representation in which FHE schemes are typically computed, and using lattice-based SNARKs to prove components of this computation separately, including the maintenance operations. Therefore, our construction can theoretically handle bootstrapping operations. We also present the first implementation of a verifiable computation on encrypted data for a computation that contains multiple ciphertext-ciphertext multiplications. Concretely, we verify the homomorphic computation of an approximate neural network containing three layers and >100 ciphertexts in less than 1 second while maintaining reasonable prover costs.