Welcome to Eduardo

The ECRYPT.NET project would like to welcome Eduardo Soria Vazquez to the University of Bristol, where he is starting a PhD working on Multi-Party Computation. 

Eduardo joins a strong and vibrant team at Bristol which has been making ground breaking contributions to the practical implementation of Multi-Party Computation technologies over the last few years. As part of Eduardo's PhD he will be engaging in research with our partner organizations, and visiting a number of companies and institutes associated with the ECRYPT project.

Draft Report on "Future Directions in Computing on Encrypted Data"

Our first draft report on "Future Directions in Computing on Encrypted Data" is now available, and we invite interested parties to provide input and comments on the report. 

• Draft Report

The report discusses various technologies ranging from deterministic encryption, searchable encryption, fully homomorphic encryption, oblivious RAM and multi-party computation. The report has been edited by Nigel Smart, after collecting input from a number of internationally renowned experts in the field.

The report will be finalized after feedback, input and discussions resulting from the associated meeting in Bristol in November. If you want to attend this meeting, which brings together the leading lights working on applying this technology to practical problems, then visit the workshop web page.

• Workshop on "Future Directions in Computing on Encrypted Data". 

The workshop is being held on November 10th and 11th at the Avon Gorge Hotel in Bristol, where the participants can relax looking over the views of the gorge and Brunel's famous suspension bridge.

Workshop on Tools for Asymmetric Cryptanalysis

Ruhr-University Bochum is organizing a one-day workshop on Tools for Asymmetric Cryptanalysis with a forthcoming whitepaper as part of the EU horizon 2020 ECRYPT-CSA project. The workshop will take place on October 8, 2015 in Bochum, Germany.

This workshop aims to provide an overview of the state of art for tools in asymmetric cryptanalysis. This covers both software as well as hardware. The workshop's major goal is to identify the current needs and open problems for cryptanalytic tools by the scientific community, governmental institutions and the industry.

The workshop will be held in the Beckmannshof on the university campus of Ruhr-University Bochum – a traditional German farm that was recently renovated. The workshop is open to interested parties based on available space. Registration is mandatory, but due to funding from ECRYPT-CSA, there is no registration fee.

Confirmed speakers

• Martin Albrecht
• Daniel Dadush
• Léo Ducas
• Thomas Johansson
• Thijs Laarhoven

Website: http://cryptool.hgi.rub.de/

Future Directions in Computing on Encrypted Data

We are hosting a two day workshop to discuss the future road map for research and potential commercial applications of technologies for computing on encrypted data. The workshop will discuss various supporting technologies such as

• Multi-Party Computation (MPC)
• Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)
• Symmetric Searchable Encryption (SSE)

as well as other related technologies. The workshop will examine applications to areas such as data anonymization, network defence, privacy, auctions, and key management.

The workshop will consist of introductory talks on the technology, as well as presentations by SMEs in the space, funders, legal experts and others. It will end with a panel session to discuss the barriers for adoption, future research directions and other matters.

Details of the workshop can be found here.

Welcome Dusan!

We are proud to announce that we could win another excellent candidate for NXP filling our second open ESR position. Dusan will complete the ECRYPT-NET team at NXP (Ventzi, Miro, Florian and Simon -- see our last post) in October.

Dusan will conduct research on cryptography for passively powered devices. Current countermeasures against physical attacks focus on specific attacks and therefore fail against combined (e.g., fault and differential power) attacks. However, the overhead for adding such countermeasures is enormous. Dusan will investigate new methods (like threshold implementations) and design approaches (e.g., leakage resilient crypto). In addition, his goal - as well as Simon's - is to target efficiency in dedicated hardware and/or embedded software.

Welcome Dusan! We wish you an exciting and successful time within ECRYPT-NET. Now, the ECRYPT-NET team at NXP is looking forward to the first meeting of the complete ECRYPT-NET family co-located with the IACR School on Design and Security of Cryptographic Algorithms and Devices on Sardinia in October.

Hiring of first ESR complete at NXP

We are happy and proud to announce that we found our first excellent early stage researcher for ECRYPT-NET. Simon will join NXP on the 1st of October this year. One of his first ECRYPT-NET experiences will be to meet his fellow ESRs from our partner organizations and the ECRYPT-NET team at the IACR School on Design and Security of Cryptographic Algorithms and Devices on Sardinia.

In the three years to come, Simon will work on the design of lightweight privacy-preserving authentication mechanisms for the internet of things. Towards this he will explore new designs for suitable cryptographic protocols and pairing-based cryptography targeting efficiency in dedicated hardware and/or embedded software.

We welcome Simon, who will also closely cooperate with the COSIC group at KU Leuven, and wish him success for his endeavor and an exciting time within ECRYPT-NET.

WISE 2015 - Workshop on Implementation: Security and Evaluation

On behalf of the ECRYPT CSA european initiative, CryptoExperts organizes a workshop on the security of cryptographic implementations. The workshop will be held on September 11, 2015 in the heart of Paris, two days before CHES, with a scientific program centered around the following themes:

• attack models and evaluation methodologies,
• present and future certification schemes and standardization,
• implementation security proofs and their automatization.

Website: https://www.cryptoexperts.com/wise2015

The workshop will be composed of invited presentations as well as a discussion panel aiming at building a vision of the current trends in the field and their expected evolutions in the future. The security of cryptographic implementations is a key topic in Europe, with both scientific and economic impacts. The purpose of this ECRYPT CSA workshop is to consult the academic, industrial and gov-related scientific communities to build the future european research roadmap in this strategic area.

Registration is free, but mandatory. Please register before August 31.