News & Events
Here we are giving you a peek into what keeps us busy, motivated and happy day in and day out.
Best Paper Award for "Quantum CCA-Secure PKE, Revisited"
The work by Navid Alamati and Varun Maram, concerns the privacy of messages in the presence of quantum decryption queries, i.e., when an adversary can query a superposition of ciphertexts. They study this notion of security, dubbed qCCA, for public-key encryption (PKE) schemes based on both generic cryptographic primitives and concrete mathematical assumptions, and present constructions.
The paper was presented at PKC 2024, where it received a Best Paper Award. Congrats Varun and Navid!
24.04.2024
Looking forward to hosting Miro and David
In May, external pageMiro Haller (PhD student at UC San Diego, US, advised by Nadia Heninger) and external pageDavid Balbás (PhD student in Cryptography at IMDEA Software Institute, Spain, advised by Dario Fiore) are coming to visit. They will be working with Matilda Backendal on advanced security guarantees for file sharing systems.
23.4.2024
Mia @ Swiss Joint Research Centre | Spring Workshop
Mia, our doctoral student, gave a presentation on Probabilistic Data Structures in Adversarial Settings at the Microsoft Swiss Joint Research Centre (MSJRC) workshop last Wednesday. This presentation showcased her focus over the past 3 years, with two years of her PhD being funded by MSJRC. The presentation was well-received, sparking interesting discussions and discussions about future research directions. You can find more information about the workshop here: external pagehttps://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/event/swiss-joint-research-centre-spring-workshop/.
12.4.2024
RWC 24 Talks are online!
Recordings for our RWC talks are now online!
Compact Frequency Estimators in Adversarial Environments by Mia Filić: external pagelink.
Obfuscated Key Exchange by Shannon Veitch: external pagelink.
What's wrong with Poly1305? - Improving Poly1305 through a Systematic Exploration of Design Aspects of Polynomial Hash Functions by Jan Gilcher Jérôme Govinden: external pagelink.
10.4.2024
Thriving in between theory and practice: How applied cryptography bridges the gap
The National Institure of Standards and Technology (NIST) Crypto Reading Club invited Matilda Backendal and Miro Haller for a presentation on their recent cryptoanalytical work. They discuss where and why the gap between theory and practice arises, and how applied cryptography helps bridging the gap.
Find more about the talk external pagehere!
3.4.2024
End-to-End Encrypted Cloud Storage @IEEE S&P Magazine
End-to-end encryption is rapidly becoming the accepted security goal for personal data. Matilda Backendal, Miro Haller and Kenny Paterson discuss the challenges and the state of the art of end-to-end secure cloud storage in a recent S&P magazine article. They survey the security guarantees of current service providers and the issues they face, discuss open research questions, and highlight the challenges that impede the deployment of end-to-end secure cloud storage.
Read more on the IEEE article external pagehere, and on the Author's version external pagepdf.
8.4.2024
Breaking Nextcloud E2EE -- at Euro S&P 24!
Our work on "Share with Care:Breaking E2EE in Nextcloud", by Martin Albrecht, Matilda Backendal, Daniele Coppola and Kenny Paterson has been accepted to Euro S&P and will be presented in Vienna this July.
Our research debunks yet another claim of “Zero Knowledge" encryption -- a term much liked by cloud storage providers, but with no concrete meaning, and a red flag for broken cryptography. We present three attacks that violate the confidentiality and integrity of all user files. Two of the vulnerabilities have been mitigated by Nextcloud after disclosure, while the third resulted in the "file sharing" feature being removed.
Lessons learnt: get your thread modelling right, don't beta-test security-critical features, prove your desgin secure before releasing it... And don't call it zero knowlege unless it involves ZKPs!
06.03.2024
Simon-Philipp Merz at the Isogeny Club
Simon gave the opening talk of the external pagefourth season of The Isogeny Club, presenting SCALLOP, an effective group action based on isogenies of supersingular curves.
The talk is based on the paper "SCALLOP: scaling the CSI-FiSh", by Luca De Feo, Tako Boris Fouotsa, Peter Kutas, Antonin Leroux, Simon-Philipp Merz, Lorenz Panny and Benjamin Wesolowski.
You can watch a recording external pagehere.
06.03.2024
Mia Filić at the FU Berlin Cybersecurity and AI Seminar
Mia is visiting Prof. Wunder's group at FU Berlin this week. She presented her work with Sam Markelon and Tom Shrimpton on Compact Frequency Estimators in Adversarial Environments at the FU Berlin Cybersecurity and AI Seminar this Wednesday, 28.02.2024. On Tuesday, Mia also explored HPI in Potsdam where the group of Prof. Lehmann welcomed her.
28.02.2024
Applied Crypto @ RWC 2024 Toronto
Our group will be featured in several talks at this year's RWC!
- Shannon Veitch will present "Obfuscated Key Exchange", a security analysis and extensions of key exchange algorithms used for censorship circumvention (by Felix Günther, Douglas Stebila, and Shannon Veitch).
- Jan Gilcher will present his work on benchmark and design of Polynomial Hash Functions over Prime Fields, "What’s Wrong with Poly1305? Improving Poly1305 through a Systematic Exploration of Design Aspects of Polynomial Hash Functions" (by Jean Paul Degabriele, Jan Gilcher, Jérôme Govinden and Kenneth Paterson).
- Mia Filić will present her work on frequency estimators (such as Count-Min Sketch and HeavyKeeper) in the presence of adversaries, "Compact Frequency Estimators in Adversarial Environments" (by Sam A. Markelon, Mia Filić and Thomas Shrimpton).
29.1.2024
New Publications from the Applied Cryptography group
Some papers from members of our group have recently been published!
You can read about:
- What's the best way to implement fast polynomial hashing: "SoK: Efficient Design and Implementation of Polynomial Hash Functions over Prime Fields", by Jean Paul Degabriele, Jan Gilcher, Jérôme Govinden and Kenneth Paterson @ SP 24.
- Quantum CCA security for public-key encryption (PKE) from generic cryptographic primitives and concrete mathematical assumptions: "Quantum CCA-Secure PKE, Revisited", by Navid Alamati and Varun Maram @ PKC 2024.
- A new way to design physically unclonable functions (PUFs) in silicon: "Using Gate Tunneling in Bulk CMOS to Create a PUF", by Patrick Camilleri, Shahram Mossayebi, Kenneth G. Paterson and Charles Grover @ IEEE IoT-J.
- New bounds in probabilistic primality testing: "Average case error estimates of the strong Lucas test", by Semira Einsele and Kenneth Paterson @ Des. Codes Cryptogr.
29.1.2024
Join us for CAW @ Eurocrypt 24
Matilda Backendal and Miro Haller (UCSD) are organising the Cryptographic Applications Workshop (CAW), as an official Affiliated Event to Eurocrypt 2024.
CAW will focus on the construction and analysis of cryptography built for practice, and feature invited and contributed talks on recent developments in the field of applied cryptography.
It will take place at ETH Zurich on Sunday, May 26, just before the start of Eurocrypt on Monday. Don't forget to register!
26.1.2024
Varun is off to new shores
In December 2023 Varun Maram successfully completed his PhD in our group. He is leaving ETH at the end of January 2024 to pursue his career as a postdoc at SandboxAQ. We lose a brilliant researcher, great colleague and friend with a very fine sense of humour. Congratulations once again, Dr. Maram, thank you for everything and all the very best wishes for your future endeavours.
25.1.2024
