PACY at PhD summer school in Croatia

13 June 2023

Last week Jerome Nguyen, Hugo Nartz and Matteo Salvino attended international PhD summer school on Real-world Crypto and Privacy 2023, which was held in Croatia and organised jointly by the researchers from Radboud University, ETH Zurich, and University of Zagreb.

The school featured many interesting lectures on different aspects of cryptography and privacy, along with an exciting social programme and networking opportunities.

We would like to thank the organisers for the provided generous support towards the participation of our PhD students in this event.

Papers accepted at EUROCRYPT 2024 and USENIX Security 2024

A strong start of the year for the PACY Lab with two papers accepted to flagship conferences on the topic of confidential computing over encrypted data: "Fully Homomorphic Encryption beyond IND-CCA1 Security: Integrity through Verifiability" accepted at EUROCRYPT 2024 introduces so-far strongest FHE security guarantees and general techniques achieving integrity and verifiability for (outsourced) FHE computations. It is also the first publication of Jérôme Nguyen. "FEASE: Fast and Expressive Asymmetric Searchable Encryption" appearing at USENIX Security 2024 is a result of collaboration with researchers from Surrey Centre for Cyber Security and our contribution to the EU H2020 project SECANT. The paper features the so-far fastest construction and implementation of a public key encryption scheme supporting private search queries over encrypted indexed data.

Co-Organisation of SECITC 2023 in Bucharest

SECITC (International Conference on Security for Information Technology and Communications) is an annual international conference held in Romania that deals with all theoretical and practical aspects of information technology and communications security. Prof. Manulis was invited to participate in SECITC 2023 in Bukharest from November 23rd to 24th as a PC Chair. The conference program included 14 peer-reviewed papers and 3 invited talks given by Prof. Bart Preneel from KU Leuven, Prof. Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi from TU Darmstadt, and Prof. Ivan Visconti from the University of Salerno. The publication of conference proceedings in an LNCS volume by Springer is expected for 2024.

PACY at ACNS 2023 in Kyoto

Last week Prof. Manulis, Hugo Nartz and Matteo Salvino attended the 21st International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS) in Kyoto, Japan. The conference programme featured two papers co-authored by PACY. The first paper titled "Revocable Hierarchical Attribute-based Signatures from Lattices" was presented by Hugo Nartz (on picture). This paper is our joint work with Daniel Gardham and Nick Frymann from the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security in the UK. The second paper titled "On the Complete Non-Malleability of the Fujisaki-Okamoto Transform" was presented by Matteo Salvino and is his joint work with Daniele Friolo and Daniele Venturi from La Sapienza, University of Rome in Italy.

PACY on satellite security for IEEE Spectrum

Prof. Manulis commented on jamming attacks and the need for cryptographic standards to protect constellations of LEO satellites for IEEE Spectrum's article "Satellite Signal Jamming Reaches New Lows". In 2020 Prof. Manulis co-authored an open-access paper titled "Cyber security in New Space" (International Journal of Information Security, Springer) which discussed these and other security challenges for the evolving New Space ecosystem.

Papers accepted at ACNS 2023 and EuroS&P 2023

Three papers co-authored by PACY lab members were accepted recently at this year's ACNS and EuroS&P conferences. The following two papers will appear in the 21st International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS 2023): "Generalised Asynchronous Remote Key Generation for Pairing-based Cryptosystems" co-authored by Prof. Manulis and Hugo Nartz with researchers from the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security extends our earlier research on ARKG to the first contructions using pairing-based cryptography. "On the Complete Non-Malleability of the Fujisaki-Okamoto Transform" co-authored by Matteo Salvino with researchers from Sapienza University of Rome explores the property of non-malleability in key encapsulation mechanisms that are based on the so-called FO transformation. The third paper titled "Asynchronous Remote Key Generation for Post-Quantum Cryptosystems from Lattices" and co-authored by Prof. Manulis with researchers from the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security will appear in the programme of the 8th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P 2023). This paper proposes first ARKG constructions using lattice-based cryptography which are compatible with cryptosystems that are being standardised by NIST, incl. Kyber and Dilithium.

Paper at ESORICS 2022 in Copenhagen

This week our paper "Unlinkable Delegation of WebAuthn Credentials" was presented at the 27th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS 2022) in Copenhagen, Denmark. The talk was delivered by Nick Frymann, an external PhD student of Prof. Manulis at the University of Surrey, UK. This paper builds on our earlier work on Asynchronous Remote Key Generation (ARKG), a new primitive for generation of cryptographic key pairs, developed in 2020 in collaboration with Yubico. We showed how ARKG can be used to enable delegation of credentials for WebAuthn protected accounts by account owners to their proxies in a way that is controllable and preserves the original security and privacy properties of the WebAuthn standard. WebAuthn is a new standard for web authentication that is expected to replace passwords and other insecure authentication methods by adopting digital signatures and security keys.