Welcome to the second edition of our Ecrypt II newsletter.
For those readers who are not familiar with the ECRYPT II network: ECRYPT II stands for European Network of Excellence for Cryptology II and it is funded within the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Programme of the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). The first phase of ECRYPT ran from 2004-2008; while the second phase is running from 2008-2012. The eleven core partners of ECRYPT II are K.U.Leuven (coordinator), R.U.Bochum, Univ. Bristol, ENS, EPFL, France Telecom, IBM Research Zurich, Royal Holloway Univ of London, T.U.Eindhoven, T.U.Graz and Univ. of Salerno. ECRYPT II has also 32 associate members.
Who is this newsletter for? This newsletter is meant for all partners and associate members involved in ECRYPT II. But the focused audience is much broader than partners only. A whole research community focusing on cryptography will find interesting information in it. This newsletter is particularly of interest to those with intentions of attending ECRYPT II workshops and schools.
What can you find in the ECRYPT II newsletter? You will be kept up to date on all latest developments within ECRYPT II. Interesting documents will be presented as well as short reports on past visits within the network. Upcoming events will be clearly announced. If you missed out of some past events you will be able to read the event report.
Here you will find new interesting documents that have been launched within ECRYPT II. In this newsletter we would like to present the following highlight:
Adapting Helios for provable ballot privacy
Recent results show that the current implementation of Helios, a practical e-voting protocol, does not ensure confidentiality for the cast votes. Some simple fixes seem to be available and the security of the revised scheme has been studied with respect to symbolic models.
In this paper we study the security of Helios using computational models. Our first contribution is a model for the property known as ballot secrecy that generalizes and extends several existing ones.
We investigate using this model an abstract voting scheme (for which the revised Helios is an instantiation) built from an arbitrary encryption scheme with certain functional properties. We prove,generically, that whenever this encryption scheme falls in the class of {\em voting-friendly} schemes that we define, the resulting voting scheme provably satisfies ballot secrecy.
We explain how our general result yields cryptographic security guarantees for the current implementation of Helios (albeit from non-standard assumptions).
Furthermore, we show (by giving two distinct constructions) that it is possible to construct voting-friendly encryption, and therefore voting schemes, using only standard cryptographic tools.
ECRYPT II stimulates short visits to, from, and within ECRYPT II to promote integration. New from this year on is that associate members can also apply for funding to host a visitor from outside the network. Are you an ECRYPT II partner or an associate member and want to host a visitor? Apply for funding here if you are a partner and apply for funding here if you are an associate member.You can read the reports of some recent visits below.
Bristol University hosted Brecht Wyseur (Nagravision, Switzerland)
The visit took place in January 2011Brecht Wyseur is currently a cryptography engineer at Nagravision, one of the leading companies for providing value-added content protection solution, e.g. pay TV. He received his Master's and PhD degrees from KU Leuven in 2003 and 2009, respectively. Before joining Nagravision, his fields of work were in the secure software implementation of cryptographic algorithms (white-box cryptography), obfuscation and software tamper resistance. Brecht visited Bristol on 21st January 2011 and gave a seminar talk on white-box cryptography. We had subsequent discussion about white-box cryptography (which assumes total leakage of all intermediate values of the cryptographic algorithm and which is more of an obfuscation technique) and related mechanisms like leakage-resilient cryptography (which takes a certain degree of leakage into account and tries to deal with this leakage). Brecht was subsequently invited to be a speaker at the VAM2 workshop on Practial Implementation Attacks in Albena, Bulgaria in May/June 2011, but unfortunately had to decline this offer due to agenda restrictions.
Bristol
University hosted Kimmo Jarvinen (Aalto University, Finland)
set extensions (esp. for SHA3 hash functions) was accepted for publication at CHES 2011.
RHUL hosted Frederik Armknecht (University of Darmstadt, Germany)
Visit Duration: 02-05 May 2011
Frederik Armknecht is a professor at Universitaet Mannheim, and visited Royal Holloway from 03 to 06 of May 2011. Frederik worked mainly with Carlos Cid during his visit, focusing on two main topics of interest: algebraic cryptanalysis of stream ciphers and the design of homomorphic encryption schemes. On the former, Frederik and Carlos discussed the potential extension of algebraic attacks beyond simple LFSR-based designs; in particular, they considered ideas for the analysis of the ZUC stream cipher (proposed as core of the new LTE algorithms). The follow-up from these discussions is planned for after the summer. On the latter, Frederik discussed with Carlos and Martin Albrecht proposals of fully homomorphic encryption schemes based on polynomial rings (polly-cracker) and on error-correcting codes. On the 05th of May, Frederik presented a talk at the weekly ISG seminar with title "On Constructing Homomorphic Encryption Schemes from Coding Theory
ECRYPT II organises yearly numerous schools and workshops. These schools and workshops bring many researchers together in Europe and therefore are an excellent means for integration and dissemination. You can read the reports of the most recent workshops and schools below.
SKEW Symmetric
Key Encryption Workshop
February 16-17, 2011, Lyngby, Denmark
Organizer: DTU on behalf of SYMLAB
URL: http://skew2011.mat.dtu.dk/
SKEW 2011 featured two invited talks: The first one was called Leakage-Resilient Cryptography: A Practical Overview by Francois-Xavier Standaert (UCL) and the second one New Mobile Phone Algorithms - A Real World Story by Steve Babbage (Vodafone). SKEW 2011 had 99 participants. Of these, 31 were from ECRYPT member organizations. There were 18 female participants and 81 male participants. 60 participants had academic affiliations, and 39 were from industry or non-academic government institutions.
In short, SKEW 2011 was a success. The quality of submissions was good and the program covered a broad scope. The two invited talks covered important aspects of current research. 99 participants were more than expected, probably due to the low registration fee and being collocated with FSE. Having no printed proceedings as hand-out to the participants, but rather making papers available online was a successful idea.
Workshop on Cryptography and Security in Clouds
March 15-16, 2011, Zurich, Switzerland
Organizer: IMB Research on behalf of MAYA
URL: http://www.zurich.ibm.com/~cca/csc2011/
This Workshop brought together researchers and practioners working in cryptography and security from academia and industry, who are interested in the security of current and future cloud computing technology. The workshop was held on the premises of the IBM Switzerland headquarters in Zurich, the program consisted of eight invited talks, twelve contributed talks and one panel disucssion.
There were 98 registered participants. About two thirds were from research institutions in the fields of cryptography, security, and distributed systems, and about one third was from local and Europe-wide industry (including security companies, banks, insurance companies and consulting). The feedback was very positive, from researchers as well as from the industrial participants.
Summer School on Design and Security of Cryptographic Algorithms and Devices
May 29 - June 3, 2011, Albena, Bulgaria
Organizer: KULeuven and on behalf of SYMLAB and VAMPIRE
URL: https://www.cosic.esat.kuleuven.be/ecrypt/courses/albena11/index.shtml
The ECRYPT II summer school on Design and Security of Cryptographic Algorithms and Devices took place in Albena (Bulgaria) from 29 May - 3rd of June 2011.
The summer school was jointly organized by two ECRYPT II virtual labs, namely SYMLAB and VAMPIRE. For SYMLAB there were five days of school. In paralel for VAMPIRE there were 3 days of school followed by a 2 day workshop on Practical Implementation Security.
During the first three days, the participants got an overview of the basic concepts both in Symmetric Cryptography and Hardware Security in 9 shared lectures. Then more advance talks followed. The 2 day workshop on Practical Implementation Security gave a broad overview of applied and real-world aspects.
The program included lectures of established speakers both from industry and academia and both from Ecrypt partners and external institutions. The participants were also both from academia and industry. They had the freedom to choose which of the parallel lectures to attend. The original set up with joint program has been very well accepted and appreciated by the audience. The PhD students working on topics in Symmetric Cryptography had the opportunity to give a short presentation at the Student Presentation Session.
Our conclusion was that this more broad program covering topics of interest for researchers from SymLab and Vampire was a very successful experiment. The school attracted 112 participants and gave the unique opportunity for PhD students and attendees from industry to attend a broad variety of lectures and discussions.
Slides of the talks can be downloaded from the website.
Workshop on Cryptography, Robustness, and Provably Secure Schemes for Female Young Researchers: Crossfyre
April 14 - 15, 2011, Darmstadt, Germany
Organizer: Tu/E and CASED Darmstadt on behalf of MAYA and VAMPIRE
URL: http://www.crossfyre.cased.deCrossFyre (Cryptography, Robustness, and provably Secure Schemes for Female Young Researchers) is the first international workshop to target female researchers in cryptography. This two-day event was organized this year for the first time by TU Eindhoven and the Center for Advanced Security Research in Darmstadt (CASED), with support from ECRYPT II. The workshop was hosted by CASED on Thursday the 14th and Friday the 15th of April 2011.
The purpose of CrossFyre was to acquaint female PhD students with each other’s research topics, thus creating greater networking possibilities. Out of the over 30 registered participants, 11 gave talks about their current research topics, their presentations comprehensively covering topics from provable security to post-quantum cryptography, implementation issues, and side channel attacks. Amongst the highlights of this year’s event were also the two invited speakers: Prof. Dr. Ingrid Verbauwhede from K.U. Leuven (who spoke this year about The costs of modern cryptography) and Prof. Dr. Tanja Lange from TU Eindhoven (whose topic was Breaking ECC2K-130). Apart from these talks, the workshop also featured an open-forum discussion about career opportunities of women in cryptography. More information about this year’s event can be found at: http://www.crossfyre.cased.de/home.html .
May 11-12, 2011, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Organizer: TU/e on behalf of MAYA and VAMPIRE
URL: http://www.win.tue.nl/cccc/cbc/
Objectives in code-based cryptography are among others generic and structural attacks against code-based-crypto schemes, reducing key sizes, alternative designs, hash functions, efficient implementations on various platforms.
During the first day we had 5 invited talks on code-based cryptography and one session to discuss research topics; during the second day we had 1 invited talk and split into 3 discussion groups. The topic considered were hardness assumptions for code-based cryptography, generating challenges to measure the progress of cryptanalysis, and new codes for building cryptosystems.
ECRYPT II Hash Function Woskshop
May 19-20, 2011, Tallinn, Estonia
Organizer: Aalto University, Tallinn University, and KU Leuven on behalf of SYMLAB
URL: http://www.ecrypt.eu.org/hash2011/index.shtml
The Hash Workshop 2011 took place May 19 - 20, 2011, in the Tallink Spa & Conference Hotel, Tallinn, Estonia. It was scheduled right after Eurocrypt 2011 (May 15 - 19, Tallinn). The workshop covered different aspects of hash functions, like cryptanalysis, theory, design, implementation and deployment of hash functions. The workshop was organised by Andrea Röck (Aalto University) and Helger Limpaa (Cybernetica AS and Tallinn University, Estonia). As a program chair Christian Rechberger (ENS, France) was responsible for the technical selection. Nicky Mouha (KU Leuven, Belgium) has created the homepage.
The workshop attracted 64 participants from academia and industry. The presentations of 17 technical contributions were covering a broad spectrum of topics. New hash function designs as well as cryptanalysis of known algorithms were presented and besides very practical topics like FPGA and silicon implementations of SHA-3 finalists also theoretical aspect of hash function were discussed.
The panel discussion on the topic "Use and misuse of distinguishers", involving John Kelsey (NIST, USA), Maria Naya-Plasencia (FHNW, Switzerland), Bart Preneel (K.U.Leuven, Belgium) and Thomas Ristenpart (University of Wisconsin, USA) and moderated by Christian Rechberger, allowed to show the different view points on this topic from theorists, hash function designers, cryptanalysts and standardisation organisations. Special highlights were also the two invited speakers: Emmanuel Prouff (Oberthur Technologies, France) discussed the application of hash functions in smart card industry and Yu Sasaki (NTT Corporation, Japan) gave an overview of recent advances in Meet-In-The-Middle preimage attacks.
The workshop was very interesting since it allowed to get an overview of the latest developments in the field of hash functions and brought together people from different backgrounds. In the evening we could enjoy the medieval charm of Tallinn and after the workshop some of us had a peak into the real spy word during the visit to the "Hotel Viru and the KGB" museum.
The ECRYPT II network consists of 11 core partners and 32 associate members. In every newsletter we focus on one partner or associate member. This time we focus on Aalto University.
Who at Aalto is active within ECRYPT II?
The Cryptography research group at Aalto University has currently five members, see the group photo above (from the left: Kimmo Järvinen, Kaisa Nyberg, Andrea Röck, Risto Hakala, Billy Brumley). From the previous members, Joo Yeon Cho was active in ECRYPT II. All members participated in ECRYPT II events and are doing research in areas covered by ECRYPT II activities.
In which ECRYPT II virtual labs is Aalto most active?
Aalto is actively involved in VAMPIRE and SYMLAB virtual labs; SymLab1 Hash Functions and SymLab3 Pulse and VAM1 Efficient Implementation of Security Systems and VAM2 Physical Security. Aalto collaborates mainly with following ECRYPT II partners and associate members; University of Luxembourg, INRIA, ENS, FHNW (CH), TU Graz , Bristol University and Ruhr Universität Bochum.
What did Aalto accomplish within ECRYPT II?
Aalto has done research and contributed to several papers on following topics; linear cryptanalysis of block ciphers, cryptanalysis of hash functions, efficient implementation of hash functions and timing attacks.
Aalto actively participated and contributed to papers in several ECRYPT II events, some examples of the past year: Third Hash Function Retreat, held at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, SKEW 2011 held in February 2011 in Copenhagen, SymLab WG3 Research Retreat, held in Leuven in October 2010, European Cryptography Day and ECRYPT II research meeting at KU Leuven and SymLab meeting in January 26-27, 2010.
In May 2011 Aalto organised the ECRYPT II Hash Workshop in Tallinn, Estonia. And they contribution to the D.Sym.6 deliverable, "New developments in symmetric key cryptanalysis" (June 2010).
What are your plans for the future?
Workshop on new applications of New Computational Problems Place:
Bochum, Germany
Date:
July 28-29, 2011 url:
http://www.cits.rub.de/conferences/maya2011.html The MAYA Workshop "New Applications of New Computational Problems" will take place at Ruhr-Universität Bochum on July 28+29 2011. It is organized by the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security.
Annual ECRYPT II overview event , Leuven
Place:
Leuven, Belgium Date:
21-22 September 2011 url:
https://www.cosic.esat.kuleuven.be/ecrypt/courses/openevent11/
The goal of the event is to present the main research achievements of ECRYPT II over the last year. The program is complemented with three invited talks on topics related to the ECRYPT II research. It is an event aiming at ECRYPT II partners, associate members as well as anyone interested in information security and cryptology. The second part of the event consists of research meetings. This part is restricted to ECRYPT II partners and associate members.
ECRYPT II Lightweight Cryptography Workshop 2011
Place:
Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Date:
October 2011 url:
Link will soon be announced ECRYPT II Lightweight Cryptography Workshop 2011 is a workshop organized by the SymLab workgroup of the ECRYPT II Network of Excellence. This workshop will be organised in Eindhoven, the Netherlands
Is Cryptographic Theory Practically Relevant? Place:
Cambridge, UK Date:
January 31 - February 02 2012 url:
Link will soon be announced The workshop aims to bring together researchers who work in theoretical aspects of cryptography (principally, provable security of protocols) with people working on applied aspects of cryptography, particularly people involved in standardization and in industrial deployment of cryptography. The main goal of the workshop is to strengthen the dialogue between these two groups of people, which is currently perceived to be quite weak. Ultimately, we aim to make a start on bridging the divide between what academic cryptographers believe should be the goals of cryptographic protocol design and what is actually deployed in the real world. The potential benefits of doing so are:
* To bring a better understanding of real-world cryptographic issues to the theoretical community, helping to inform their research and set new research challenges for the theoretical community;
* Enabling practitioners to develop a clearer view of the current state-of-the-art in cryptographic research and what it offers to practice;
* Providing a forum for exchanging ideas and building relationships between researchers from the different communities.
ECRYPT II Questionnaire on event topics and formats
ECRYPT II offers a wide range of integration and dissemination activities that include joint workshops, exchange of researchers, development of common tools and benchmarks, a training program, a substantial contribution towards standardization bodies and an active publication policy.
In order to improve the integration between industry and academia, we would like to define the perfect event for industry people; The questionnaire enquires about relevant event formats and topics. It will take only 2 minutes of your time. Your collaboration will be very much appreciated.
https://www.cosic.esat.kuleuven.be/ecrypt/questionnaire/index.php