All papers in 2026 (2478 results)

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Last updated:  2026-09-18
Faster Incremental Authenticated Dictionaries: Removing the Query Bottleneck
Michael A. Bender, John Kuszmaul, and William Kuszmaul
Known lower bounds prohibit the construction of very-efficient authenticated dictionaries that support both insertions and deletions. It remains an open question, however, whether it may be possible to construct very efficient authenticated dictionaries that are \emph{insertion-only}. The current paper answers this question in the affirmative, providing the constructions that strictly dominate the classic Merkle tree in the incremental setting. Our first result is an authenticated incremental dictionary, called the exponential Verkle forest, that supports retrieval queries with time and proof size $O(\log \log n)$ and that supports insertions with time and proof size $O(\log \log \log n)$. The data structure also offers an \emph{amortized} bound of $O(1)$ for insertions. Building on this, we also present a full-query version of the dictionary, supporting both retrieval and exclusion queries. This data structure continues to support retrieval queries in time and proof size $O(\log \log n)$, while supporting all other operations in time and proof size $O(\log n)$. Our results take a purely data-structural perspective on authenticated data structures, seeking to achieve the best bounds possible with the cryptographic primitives (collision-resistant hashing and position-binding vector commitments) that already exist. We also give partial evidence, in the form of a lower bound that applies to a natural class of data structures, that our $O(\log \log n)$ query bound is optimal for any solution with linear construction time.
Last updated:  2026-09-25
End-to-End Hard-Label Cryptanalytic Model Extraction Using Efficient Sign Recovery
Akira Ito, Takayuki Miura, and Yosuke Todo
The importance of deep neural networks (DNNs) is widely recognized, and the parameters obtained through training are regarded as valuable assets. Recently, attacks that extract these parameters using only oracle queries to a DNN have been actively studied at IACR conferences. The hard-label setting is the most challenging setting for model extraction, where an adversary can observe only the final output label, such as “dog” or “cat.” At Eurocrypt 2025, Carlini et al. proposed polynomial-time hard-label extraction of ReLU-based MLPs. However, one step of this attack process, i.e., sign recovery, requires a large number of queries and substantial computation. Implementing this step in a black-box setting remains difficult. Consequently, a fully black-box end-to-end demonstration on trained deep ReLU MLPs has remained a challenge. In this paper, we propose a new sign-recovery algorithm based on a completely different principle from the existing method. Our method requires no dedicated queries for sign recovery. In our experiments, it achieves higher sign-recovery accuracy than the existing method. Consequently, it enables efficient sign recovery even for trained models. With our sign-recovery algorithm, all steps of hard-label model extraction can be implemented in a black-box setting. By combining these implementations, we demonstrate end-to-end model extraction from models trained on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST, with width 16 and 4 or 6 hidden layers, achieving over 98% label agreement.
Last updated:  2026-09-18
Perpetual Encryption
Yevgeniy Dodis and Daniel Jost
Traditional public-key encryption (PKE) schemes have a static secret key. This means that the secret key owner can decrypt any old ciphertext in perpetuity. Schemes with changing secret keys, supporting so-called epochs, have been considered for a variety of reasons, such as post-compromise security or more simply supporting communication among a dynamically changing group. This complicates perpetuity, especially in settings where the epoch number itself is supposed to be confidential. We address this concern by introducing perpetual encryption (PE). The scheme leverages a trusted group manager to distribute states for each epoch such that: (1) without such a secret state, ciphertexts look pseudorandom and, hence, hide the epoch number; and (2) parties in a later epoch can still decrypt encryptions for old epochs in sublinear time (in the number of epochs). More stringently, we require that whenever a party in an earlier epoch decrypts to a message m then any party in a later epoch must arrive at the same message, even for adversarially crafted ciphertexts. We build an efficient, unbounded-epoch PE scheme based on anonymous PKE, hashing, and other standard symmetric primitives. We also extend our scheme to protect against malicious group managers, at the expense of limiting the maximum number of epochs. All our schemes have fixed-sized states and decryption times, independent of the number of epochs.
Last updated:  2026-09-18
Cryptanalytic Extraction of Neural Networks Without Known Architecture Assumption
Yantian Shen, Yi Chen, Anyu Wang, Hongbo Yu, and Xiaoyun Wang
Cryptanalytic model extraction aims to reconstruct a functionally equivalent model through black-box interactions with the victim model. Under the fundamental assumption that the network architecture is completely known, existing attacks achieve the goal by recovering the model parameters. In this paper, we explore whether this assumption can be removed practically. Focusing on ReLU fully connected networks, which are widely studied in this field, we propose a guess-and-determine framework that jointly recovers the network architecture (including network depth and hidden-layer dimensions) and the model parameters. This framework is based on a simple yet effective high-level idea: after designing a parameter recovery attack under the known-architecture assumption, we can analyze the architecture-sensitive traces observed during parameter recovery to recover the network architecture. We identify two such traces in differential extraction attacks: (i) a zero suffix in the merged weight vectors produced by signature recovery, whose length reveals the hidden layer dimension; and (ii) an equality pattern in the preimage-based sign recovery, which occurs only under the true hidden layer dimension. These two signals give rise to two routes for network architecture recovery. For the second-to-last layer, we further propose two methods, one for identifying it, and one for recovering its dimension. Practical end-to-end attacks are implemented on a wide range of ReLU neural networks, including both expansive and non-expansive networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the feasibility of achieving functionally equivalent extraction on deep neural networks, after removing the known-architecture assumption, has been demonstrated in practice.
Last updated:  2026-09-18
Tree Encodings IV: Depth-Unbounded Attribute-Based Encryption and Delay Encryption
Damiano Abram, Giulio Malavolta, and Lawrence Roy
Assuming the polynomial-time hardness of Decomposed LWE, a variant of the learning with errors (LWE) problem, we construct ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption for depth-unbounded (but bounded-space) predicates. Previously, attribute-based encryption for depth-unbounded predicates was only known from an insecure version of evasive LWE, or by additionally assuming the cryptographic hardness of discrete logarithms, which makes such schemes quantum-insecure. Adapting these techniques, we also obtain the first construction of lattice-based delay encryption [Burdges and De Feo, EUROCRYPT'21], additionally assuming the existence of any space-bounded sequential function. Finally, as a contribution of independent interest, we show how to instantiate the latter from a circular variant of decomposed LWE. This also gives the first delay encryption that does not require explicit sequentiality assumptions.
Last updated:  2026-09-18
Tree Encodings III: Time/Space Hardness from Lattice Problems
Damiano Abram, Giulio Malavolta, and Lawrence Roy
Assuming the polynomial-time hardness of a variant of the short integer solution (SIS) problem, we show the existence of sequential and memory-hard functions. Such an assumption postulates the hardness of a problem against polynomial-time algorithms, regardless of their memory and depth. Yet, we show that this assumption implies that $\mathsf{P} \neq \mathsf{NC}$, that $\mathsf{P} \neq \mathsf{L}$, and that the $\mathsf{NC}$ hierarchy is proper, i.e., that $\mathsf{NC}^1 \subsetneq \mathsf{NC}^2\subsetneq \mathsf{NC}^3 \dots$ Our main technical tool is a new variant of homomorphic computation over lattice encodings, which does not impose a bound on the circuit depth and is not based on bootstrapping.
Last updated:  2026-09-24
Indifferentiability of the Sum of Two Permutations: Tight 3n/4 Security for the Uniform Simulator and a New Simulator for 4n/5 Security
Sunyeop Kim
We study the regular indifferentiability of the sum of two n-bit permutations. Previous work proved 2n/3-bit security and gave a 5n/6-bit attack against the uniform simulator. We prove 3n/4-bit se curity for the simulator and give a matching attack. Our proof bounds the KL divergence between response distributions by tracking the bias in unrevealed construction values through their conditional distribution, which was not analysed in detail in previous work. To exceed this thresh old, we introduce the Gyroscope simulator, which adjusts inverse-query acceptance probabilities to compensate for the bias left by earlier re sponses. The Gyroscope simulator achieves 4n/5-bit security.
Last updated:  2026-09-18
Keep Track of Your Errors: Solving ILWE and Improving Attacks on ML-DSA
Mohamed ElGhamrawy, Thomas Eisenbarth, Julius Hermelink, Anja Rabich, Florian Sieck, Silvan Streit, Jonas Thietke, and Zhiyuan Zhang
With the widespread adoption of NIST's new signature standard ML-DSA imminent, understanding its vulnerability to side-channel attacks is increasingly important. Current approaches that are based on deriving (Concealed) Integer Learning with Errors (ILWE) samples from side information require hundreds of thousands of signatures even in noise-free conditions, limiting their practicality. In this work, we show that the number of signatures required in these attacks has been drastically overestimated. Keeping track of the error probability distribution when deriving ILWE samples allows for a soft-analytic approach to solving ILWE. Concretely, we show that distribution hints (Eurocrypt 2025) may be derived from ILWE samples and the corresponding belief propagation-based solver can recover the secret key efficiently. We then conceptually compare previous solvers to our soft-analytic approach. Furthermore, we provide an information-theoretic analysis and answer an open question---on how to filter out relations---posed in a different line of attacks against ML-DSA (Crypto 2025); thereby, we can propose improvements in the application of these solvers. We evaluate our approach across various ILWE and Concealed ILWE parameter sets. In addition, we analyze a recently discovered timing leakage in ML-DSA and show how to solve for the secret key with far fewer signatures. In a noise-free attack setting, our approach reduces the average number of signatures required by a factor of 62---from 139 million to 2.25 million---compared with linear regression, as originally proposed, with larger improvements under noise. Thus, we show that attacks that derive ILWE and Concealed ILWE instances require far fewer signatures than previously believed, and their impact has been underestimated.
Last updated:  2026-09-30
Refining Probabilistic-Linearization TIDA for 5-Round SHA3-384 Collision Attacks (Full Version)
Luhan Yan, Zhenzhen Bao, and Huina Li
Since the SHA-3 family was standardized by NIST in 2015, its collision resistance has been extensively studied. The previous best-known collision attack on 5-round SHA3-384 is based on internal differentials and the probabilistic-linearization variant of two-block Target Internal Differential Algorithm (TIDA). Its connector replaces deterministic affine restrictions that guarantee S-box differential validity by higher-dimensional affine relaxations, reducing the number of linear constraints and preserving more degrees of freedom. The price is that solutions of the linearized system are only probabilistically valid. In particular, once the first message block fixes the inner part variables, the remaining affine solution space cannot be treated as a set of independent trials; only part of its freedom effectively contributes to the connector probability. This paper refines the probabilistic-linearization framework in two ways. We first propose SA-PIDS, a simulated-annealing-based search for affine-subspace assignments, improving the trade-off among capacity constraints, the product-density estimate, and the remaining solution-space dimension. We then give a structural evaluation of the actual connector probability, explaining how the effective remaining freedom in the solution space after fixing the first block could be used and counted. Using the same target internal differential characteristic as the previous 5-round SHA3-384 attack, our refinements reduce the theoretical complexity from $2^{170.73}$ to $2^{164.11}$.
Last updated:  2026-09-18
Is it safe to lie? Revisiting Incoercible Multi-Party Computation in the Universal Composability Framework
Saskia Bayreuther, Robin Berger, Eva Hetzel, and Jörn Müller-Quade
In a multi-party protocol, incoercibility aims to protect protocol participants by allowing them to use their honest inputs even in the presence of a coercer. A coercer is an adversary who pressures protocol parties into deviating from the protocol. One goal of an incoercible protocol is that the coercer cannot distinguish if the coerced party obeys their command or is deceiving: The coerced party should be able to plausibly deny their deception to ensure their safety. In the past, several attempts at modeling incoercibility in the Universal Composability framework have been made. In Alwen, Ostrovsky, Zhou, and Zikas’ model (CRYPTO 2015), the deception is modeled as a mapping of protocol messages that are sent and received by the coerced party beyond the reach of the coercer. Similar to proofs in plain UC, in order to prove the incoercibility of a protocol, one shows the indistinguishability of ideal and real worlds. Alwen et al.’s incoercibility definition makes use of four worlds: In both the ideal and the real worlds either coercion or deception takes place. If the environment can neither distinguish between the two coercion worlds nor between the two deception worlds for all ideal deception strategies, the protocol incoercibly UC-realizes the ideal functionality. While this shows that it is always possible for a coerced party to deviate from the coercer’s instructions and deceive them, it does not cover if this deception can be detected by the coercer. In this paper, we tackle the question how the perceived difference between deception and coercion can be modeled in UC. In particular, we make the following contributions. First, we refine the incoercibility notion by Alwen et al. by limiting the deception strategies to ones that allow the coerced party to plausibly deny the deception. We propose a multi-party computation protocol, derived from the one presented by Alwen et al., that fulfills this notion. The protocol uses hardware tokens to make UC-protocols, now including reactive functionalities, incoercible, where coerced parties can deceive the coercer about inputs as well as outputs. Secondly, we define a notion for plausible deniability, which we call Γ-deniability, and show that when the evaluated function is a differentially private mechanism, the deceiving party can plausibly deny their actions.
Last updated:  2026-09-18
Detecting split surfaces, RM surfaces, and minimum walks on isogeny graphs
Eda Kırımlı and Gaurish Korpal
We study the detectability of split surfaces in isogeny graphs of principally polarized superspecial abelian surfaces, a question relevant to the security analysis of dimension-$2$ isogeny-based cryptography. Our approach uses refined Humbert invariants to replace explicit isogeny computations with primitive representation problems for positive definite quadratic forms in five variables. We develop algorithms to detect $(N,N)$-splittings and to compute the minimum $(N,N)$-splitting level of a superspecial Jacobian without constructing the corresponding isogeny path. The same framework detects embeddings of real multiplication (RM) orders through primitive representations of discriminants of real quadratic orders. For RM, we use exhaustive small-prime data together with $100{,}000$ random polarizations per prime for $227\leq p\leq1619$, testing primitive representations of square-free discriminants $D\leq100$; the first nontrivial primitively represented discriminant is typically small. We apply these methods experimentally in two regimes. For $11\leq p\leq251$, where the irreducible principal polarizations are known exhaustively, the automorphism data recovered from the refined Humbert invariant reproduces the counts of Ibukiyama--Katsura--Oort for the irreducible polarizations. For large parameters, we reach primes of $1000$ bits, where the splitting degrees produced satisfy $\log_2N\approx\log_2p$ with a distribution whose shape is stable across the whole range, so the detected $(N,N)$-isogeny has degree about $p^{2}$; the smallest observed largest prime-power divisor of $N$ remains small up to $250$ bits and increases sharply from $300$ bits onward.
Last updated:  2026-09-18
Batched and Weighted Threshold Encryption with Silent Setup
Amit Agarwal, Rutchathon Chairattana-Apirom, Sourav Das, and Babak Poorebrahim Gilkalaye
Batched Threshold Encryption (BTE) enables a committee of parties to jointly decrypt any subset of ciphertexts from a large set, while all other ciphertexts remain private. BTE has applications in blockchains, particularly in designing encrypted mempools, where transactions are encrypted until included into a block to prevent maximal extractable value (MEV) attacks. Existing BTE constructions, however, encounter one of the following usability downsides: (a) reliance on expensive distributed key generation (DKG) protocols, (b) dependency on a batch label during ciphertext generation, (c) ciphertexts that are only decryptable if they are encoded with respect to a non-conflicting index in the batch, or (d) no support for weighted threshold policies. In this work, we present a BTE scheme that simultaneously addresses all of the above issues. It has a silent setup (key generation does not require interaction between parties), is batch and index independent, and supports weighted threshold policies. Our construction is based on prime-order groups with bilinear pairings with security proof in the Generic Group Model. Our ciphertext size is also the shortest among existing silent batched threshold encryption schemes with only $2$ group elements in addition to the message length.
Last updated:  2026-09-18
Dynamic Participant Updates to Access and Adversary Structures for Ideal Secret Sharing Schemes Based on Linear Codes
Xu Qiuxia, Tang Chunming, and Yi Zongxiang
The paper investigates secret sharing schemes based on linear codes, focusing primarily on the access structures and adversary structures arising from dynamic participant updates, as well as on whether such access structures can be realized by ideal linear secret sharing schemes. First, we characterize the maximal adversary structure corresponding to the access structure obtained by adding new participants to every authorized subsets of a given access structure.Second, we prove that the original access structure can be realized by a linear code $C(n+1)[n+1,k;q]$ if and only if the access structure obtained after adding $\ell$ new participants can be realized by a linear code $C(n+\ell+1)[n+\ell+1,k+\ell;q]$. In addition, we establish the correspondence between the codewords of these two linear codes. Furthermore, We prove that the original access structure can be realized by an ideal secret sharing scheme if and only if the expanded access structure can be realized by one as well. Finally, we demonstrate that every linear secret sharing scheme realizing a disjoint access structure is ideal. We also prove that access structures whose any two minimal authorized subsets share all but one participant can be realized by an ideal linear secret sharing scheme. In addition, we determine the adversary structure corresponding to this class of access structures. More generally, we obtain the maximal adversary structure when new participants are added to merely part of the minimal authorized subsets.
Last updated:  2026-09-18
Quantum implementation of Keccak-f(25) for emulator and quantum hardware, and application to quantum password cracking
Mathilde Chenu and Mario Chizzini
In this work, we present a quantum implementation of Keccak-$f(25)$, a toy version of SHA-3 introduced in the specification of Keccak, with the objective of using as few qubits as possible so that the resulting implementation can be run both on quantum emulators and on quantum hardware. The code, written in Qiskit, uses $25$ qubits representing the internal state. All computations are performed in-place, meaning that no ancillary qubit is required. We use this implementation to compare the number of logical and instruction-set-architecture quantum gates required to run Keccak-$f(25)$, both on emulators and on quantum hardware, as well as for Grover's algorithm on the hash function. Finally, we use our implementation to highlight the specificity of quantum password cracking using Grover's algorithm with Keccak-$f(25)$.
Last updated:  2026-09-18
Faster SVP in Polynomial Space
Yansong Feng, Yiming Gao, and Jiaqi Liu
Kannan's algorithm, as analyzed by Hanrot and Stehl\'e in 2007, solves the exact Euclidean shortest vector problem in polynomial space and \(n^{\frac{n}{2e}+o(n)}\) time. In the classical setting with polynomial space, we obtain the first improvement on this bound via a randomized algorithm that runs in \(n^{\frac{n}{4e}+o(n)}\) time. The main idea is to represent a fixed shortest vector in many ways as a difference of samples, thereby enabling the low-space collision search of Lyu and Zhu (SODA 2023) to replace exhaustive enumeration in the original analysis.
Last updated:  2026-09-18
Two-Bit Lifting for Ternary SIS: Polynomial-Time Collision Attacks on LtHash
Rui Ding, Xiaorui Gong, Hao Jiang, and Lili Tang
LtHash is a lattice-based incremental hash function introduced by Bellare and Micciancio at EUROCRYPT 1997. It can be used in distributed systems to efficiently maintain digests of changing data. Its set-collision resistance rests on the average-case hardness of the ternary short integer solution (SIS) problem in the random oracle model. LtHash implementations typically use power-of-two groups $(\mathbb{Z}/2^d\mathbb{Z})^N$ for efficient machine-word arithmetic and SIMD parallelism. Previous security estimates were based on Wagner-type generalized birthday attacks with sub-exponential running time. Chen, Liu, and Zhandry (CLZ, EUROCRYPT'22) describe a folklore algorithm attributed to Regev that solves ternary SIS modulo $2^d$. Applying this algorithm to LtHash yields polynomial-time collision attacks requiring $O(N^d)$ hash queries, a result that has not been previously documented. We improve the Regev--CLZ algorithm by canceling two modulus bits per layer instead of one, while preserving ternary coefficients. This reduces the number of input columns---and hence the number of LtHash queries---from $O(N^d)$ to $O(N^{\lceil d/2\rceil})$. This refutes the uniform average-case formulation of Liyan Chen et al.'s conjecture (ITC'26) that the Regev--CLZ bound is optimal. Our technique also extends to inhomogeneous SIS with the same bound. For LtHash16 with $(N,d)=(1024,16)$, used at Facebook and in Solana, our attack requires approximately $2^{81}$ hash queries. Its expected computational cost is at most $2^{101}$ scalar operations over $\mathbb{F}_2$, compared with our estimates of approximately $2^{180}$ operations for the Regev--CLZ algorithm and $2^{188}$ for the state-of-the-art generalized birthday attack of Tang et al. (CRYPTO'26), under their respective operation models. Our query and scalar-operation costs are both far below the level suggested by the original claim of at least 200-bit security.
Last updated:  2026-09-18
Incremental Keyword Private Information Retrieval from d-ary Segmented Cuckoo Filters
Bao Ninh
We introduce RisePIR, the first preprocessing keyword private information retrieval (PIR) scheme that absorbs insert, update, and delete on its key-value store at a cost proportional to the number of mutations alone. Where the static state-of-the-art schemes ChalametPIR and $\mathsf{KPIR}^{\mathsf{index}}$ re-run their preprocessing from scratch on every change, RisePIR patches its preprocessing in place and stays as practical as both in the online phase. We give a generic construction of incremental preprocessing keyword PIR from any updatable preprocessing index PIR, an index PIR that efficiently supports in-place update. The construction rests on our $d$-ary Segmented Cuckoo Filter, a cuckoo filter that confines the $j$-th candidate bucket of every key to the $j$-th of $d$ segments and stays dynamic under partial-key cuckoo hashing. Instantiating the construction over FrodoPIR and SimplePIR, each equipped with the entry-level hint patch of iSimplePIR, gives RisePIR-F and RisePIR-S, both secure under decisional LWE. On a store of about one million keys, both variants patch their hint in place in 0.06–4.7 ms per mutation, five to six orders of magnitude faster than the 56–686 s full re-run of the preprocessing phase. Their online phase stays competitive with ChalametPIR and $\mathsf{KPIR}^{\mathsf{index}}$ in both asymptotic and concrete cost. We deploy RisePIR-S as a privacy-preserving eth_getBalance service over the $2.05 \times 10^{8}$ accounts of Ethereum mainnet, so that a wallet reads a balance without revealing to its RPC provider which account it holds. The running service answers a private query in 0.69 s and absorbs each block's changes in 5.6 ms, well inside the 12 s block interval. The filter and RisePIR ship as an open-source Rust implementation, together with the benchmark harness behind every number in this paper.
Last updated:  2026-09-18
FRI-Style Rank Metric PCS via FFT for Gabidulin Encoding
Songsong Li, Zhe Li, Shu Liu, Chaoping Xing, and Chen Yuan
Polynomial commitment schemes (PCSs) are fundamental cryptographic primitives, with applications to SNARKs, data availability, and privacy preserving protocols. Many efficient transparent PCSs are built from interactive oracle proofs of proximity (IOPPs) for codes in the Hamming metric. In constructions based on the fast Reed-Solomon IOPP (FRI), low degree polynomials are encoded as Reed-Solomon (RS) codewords over suitable evaluation domains, and FRI is used to test proximity to the RS code. The efficiency of this approach relies on fast Fourier transform (FFT) based encoding and recursive proximity testing through folding operations. Motivated by applications of rank metric codes in post quantum cryptography, random linear network coding, and distributed storage, we develop an analogous framework based on Gabidulin codes, the rank metric counterparts of RS codes. These codes encode $q$-linearized polynomials of bounded $q$-degree over $\mathbb F_{q^m}$ by evaluating them at $\mathbb F_q$-linearly independent points in this field. We construct a recursive FFT for these polynomials and show that its algebraic structure supports both proximity testing for Gabidulin codes and succinct verification of polynomial evaluations, yielding a FRI-style PCS for $q$-linearized polynomials. Our contributions are as follows. \begin{enumerate} \item[(1)] \textbf{FFT algorithms for $q$-linearized polynomials.} For every $O(1)$-smooth positive integer $n\mid m$, we construct an $\mathbb F_q$-linearly independent evaluation set $\mathcal A\subseteq\mathbb F_{q^m}$ of size $n$. On this set, we present FFT and inverse FFT algorithms for evaluating and interpolating $q$-linearized polynomials of $q$-degree less than $n$ over $\mathbb F_{q^m}$. Both algorithms require $O(n\log n)$ operations in $\mathbb F_{q^m}$. Consequently, Gabidulin codes defined over $\mathcal A$ admit encoding with the same complexity. \item[(2)] \textbf{A FRI-style IOPP for Gabidulin codes.} The recursive structure of our FFT induces a folding operation that reduces a Gabidulin code instance of length $n$ to one of length $n/2$. Combining this operation with recent proximity gap results for Gabidulin codes, we construct a FRI-style IOPP, which we call the Fast Gabidulin IOPP (FGI). The soundness analysis accounts for the Frobenius twists introduced by folding and their effect on rank metric proximity. \item[(3)] \textbf{A FGI based PCS for $q$-linearized polynomials.} The usual quotient based opening reduction in PCSs for ordinary polynomials does not directly preserve for $q$-linearized polynomials. We instead use the FGI folding structure to recursively reduce the proximity claim and the evaluation claim together. Combined with Merkle tree commitments, this yields a transparent PCS for $q$-linearized polynomials with polylogarithmic proof size and verification time. \end{enumerate}
Last updated:  2026-09-18
Lightweight Cryptography for Secure UAV Data Integrity Using Ascon-XOF128 and SHAKE128
Mehul Kumar Das, Varun Shukla, Prabhavi Tripathi, Vivek Shukla, Divya Mishra, and Atul
The increasing deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in communication, surveillance, and other mission-critical applications has created a growing requirement for efficient mechanisms to preserve the integrity of exchanged data. UAV platforms may operate under computational, memory, energy, and communication constraints, making lightweight cryptographic techniques an important consideration for secure data processing. This paper investigates the applicability of lightweight cryptography for UAV data integrity using two extendable-output functions (XOFs), Ascon-XOF128 and SHAKE128. A mathematical framework is developed to represent UAV messages, cryptographic processing, integrity verification, and relevant security and performance metrics. The two XOF constructions are analyzed with respect to their internal structures, sponge-based processing, security properties, computational characteristics, and suitability for resource-constrained UAV communication. A comparative evaluation framework is established using message-size and output-length variations, with performance and integrity-related measures including execution time, throughput, computational cost, memory usage, communication overhead, and Hamming-distance-based analysis. The study aims to provide an evidence-based comparison of Ascon-XOF128 and SHAKE128 for UAV data-integrity workloads and to identify the practical trade-offs between lightweight resource requirements and cryptographic integrity performance.
Last updated:  2026-09-18
Period-Aligned Secure Cosine Evaluation Based on Two-Party Computation
Qingyu Mo
The cosine function is widely used in machine-learning applications, but evaluating it on secret-shared data is difficult. Conventional approaches use polynomial approximations or lookup tables, whose costs grow substantially over large input domains. More recent protocols first reduce the private input modulo the cosine period, but securely performing this modular reduction also incurs significant cost. We present a period-aligned two-party cosine protocol. Based on the cosine addition rule, it rescales each share so that a wrap of the input modulus corresponds to a full $2\pi$ period and therefore does not change the recombined cosine. Each party evaluates sine and cosine locally on its share, while the secure computation uses only two cross-party products and one fixed-point output conversion. We evaluate the protocol directly on synthetic inputs and within private RFF-based RBF-SVM prediction. Comparisons with the protocol of Xing et al. (NDSS 2025) and Guo et al. (USENIX Security 2026) demonstrate better efficiency of our proposed protocol.
Last updated:  2026-09-18
Radical Ring-LWR: Efficient Key Encapsulation and Signatures from Structured Rounding
Joost Renes, Joppe W. Bos, Haochen Huang, Selim Kirbiyik, Alberto Ovena, Sujoy Sinha Roy, Frederik Vercauteren, Peng Wang, Fangyu Zheng, and Chenxin Zhong
State-of-the-art lattice-based cryptography requires a power-of-two cyclotomic field that limits the attainable security levels, or a module structure for which the cost grows quadratically in the module rank. Radical rings were recently proposed as a solution in the context of Learning With Errors (LWE) based Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs) with heuristic hardness arguments for the Ring-LWE security and failure probability. We develop the Learning With Rounding counterpart, Radical Ring-LWR (RR-LWR). We give a proved closed-form bound on the distortion incurred from the error sampling independent of the radical ring parameters: this places RR-LWR inside the regime identified by Peikert as safe for instantiating Ring-LWE/LWR. We instantiate two schemes: Mithril, an IND-CCA KEM, and Octarine, an EF-CMA signature scheme. They are built on a single radical-ring arithmetic foundation based on powers of two (favorable for sampling, rounding and masking) and we provide security reductions in the QROM to RR-LWR and SelfTarget-RR-SIS, a radical-ring variant of SIS. We show that the KEM failure probability estimators used for power-of-two cyclotomics are insufficient and provide an exact solution tailored to the RR-LWR setting. Finally, we instantiate Mithril and Octarine with concrete parameters and benchmark optimized AVX2 and Arm Cortex-M4 implementations, showing that both are competitive with (and in some cases significantly faster than) the MLKEM and MLDSA standards.
Last updated:  2026-09-18
Practical Group Signatures from Tag-Based NTRU Sampler
Corentin Jeudy
The post-quantum migration for key agreements and signatures being well underway, the focus naturally shifts to other properties and primitives that still lack efficient solutions. One such area is that of privacy-enhanced primitives, with a growing number of post-quantum constructions. Among the most fundamental are group signatures, which represent an important milestone of anonymity and accountability towards more involved designs. However, despite recent progress, most compact lattice constructions are either computationally intensive or suffer large key materials, or both. In this paper, we introduce a new lattice group signature scheme that reaches compact signatures and keys, while being runtime-efficient in all its procedures. Our key element is a new tag-based gadget sampler that properly interfaces with NTRU, then benefiting from the desirable properties of such trapdoor frameworks for advanced constructions while leveraging the compactness of NTRU. Although applied to group signatures, our sampler may be of independent interest and used for more expressive privacy-driven primitives like anonymous credentials. We also introduce two assumptions, which can be seen as hybrid versions of NTRU and ISIS, that independently underly the security of our group signature. Despite their similarities with the recently introduced NTRU-ISIS$_f$ assumption, they appear strictly harder and even admit reductions from R-ISIS in some parameter settings.
Last updated:  2026-09-20
Symmetry-Graded Digit Extraction Framework for Faster BGV Bootstrapping
Zhenyu Xiong, Mingsheng Wang, Zhedong Wang, and Han Wang
Bootstrapping is the bottleneck of BGV/BFV homomorphic encryption, and for large plaintext primes $p$ its cost is dominated by digit extraction. Recently, this stage has been accelerated along two separate routes. The first lowers the degree of the digit-extraction polynomial: the bounded-support construction of Ma et al. (Eurocrypt'24) confines its support, and the order-four filter of Xiong et al. (to appear in Asiacrypt'26) removes three quarters of its monomials. The second lowers the depth of its evaluation: the Galois norm map of Okada et al. (Asiacrypt'23) and Zhao et al. (Crypto'26) evaluates a degree-$d$ factor in logarithmic depth. However, how the two routes relate and whether they compose has remained open. We propose a symmetry-graded framework that views the two evaluation routes as commuting group actions on the digit-extraction polynomial. Under this unified perspective, the existing evaluators correspond to different specializations of $\mathrm{cost}(D;r,d)$. For lower degree, we identify a novel rank-two lattice structure underlying digit extraction. The crystallographic restriction limits the filter order to $r\in\{1,2,3,4,6\}$. In particular, the methods of Ma et al. and Xiong et al. correspond to $r=2$ and $r=4$, respectively. Moreover, our framework derives a sparser order-six digit-extraction polynomial, enabling order-six symmetry for Mersenne primes. For lower evaluation cost, we construct a composed evaluator that first folds $P_A$ using the scalar filter and then evaluates the folded polynomial via the slot ring's Galois norm map. Since the rotation and Frobenius actions commute, the two optimizations can be combined within the same framework. Consequently, for any $(p,m)$ we select the optimal $(r,d)$ and evaluate digit extraction in $2\sqrt{D/(rd)}+O(\log D)$ non-scalar multiplications. On 13 general cyclotomic rings at $\geq 80$-bit verified security, our single-threaded HElib implementation improves upon the state-of-the-art evaluator of Ma et al., accelerating digit extraction by $2.4$–$4.9\times$ and thin bootstrapping by $1.3$–$2.8\times$, while modifying only the digit-extraction stage. In particular, on Ma et al.'s set IV with the Mersenne prime $p=8191$ and set V with $p=65537$, digit extraction is accelerated by $3.6\times$ and $3.8\times$, respectively, reducing the total bootstrapping time from 180.4 s to 85.5 s and from 217.6 s to 103.1 s. The implementation is publicly available, and the core analysis is machine-checked in Lean 4.
Last updated:  2026-09-17
Bounding the Excess Risk for Linear Models Trained on Marginal-Preserving, Differentially-Private, Synthetic Data
Yvonne Zhou, Mingyu Liang, Ivan Brugere, Danial Dervovic, Antigoni Polychroniadou, Min Wu, and Dana Dachman-Soled
The growing use of machine learning (ML) has raised concerns that an ML model may reveal private information about an individual who has contributed to the training dataset. To prevent leakage of sensitive data, we consider using differentially-private (DP), synthetic training data instead of real training data to train an ML model. A key desirable property of synthetic data is its ability to preserve the low-order marginals of the original distribution. Our main contribution comprises novel upper and lower bounds on the excess empirical risk of linear models trained on such synthetic data, for continuous and Lipschitz loss functions. We perform extensive experimentation alongside our theoretical results
Last updated:  2026-09-17
Revisiting Malicious Private Aggregation: Formalization, Weaknesses, and Enhancements
Ananya Appan, Pranav Shriram Arunachalaramanan, David Heath, and Ling Ren
Private aggregation schemes enable aggregation of sensitive data across clients without leaking any individual client's input. Their applications include privacy-preserving federated learning, private heavy hitters, and anonymous systems. Many private aggregation schemes assume two non-colluding servers and aim to guarantee privacy even when one server is malicious, i.e., the malicious server learns an aggregation result that includes all honest client inputs. However, many private aggregation schemes in the literature fail to achieve privacy, which we believe is in large part due to a lack of formalism for the nuanced variations of privacy guarantees. In this work, we present ideal functionalities for several variants of private aggregation. We also formalize a common paradigm underlying most prior private aggregation schemes. The formal treatment helps us identify security flaws or underspecifications in existing private aggregation schemes. We then present modular modifications or fill in critical details to help prior schemes in the share-aggregate paradigm securely realize the private aggregation functionalities we formally define, including in settings where clients may have unreliable networks.
Last updated:  2026-09-17
Revisiting ML Training under Fully Homomorphic Encryption: Convergence Guarantees, Differential Privacy, and Efficient Algorithms
Yvonne Zhou, Mingyu Liang, Ivan Brugere, Danial Dervovic, Yue Guo, Antigoni Polychroniadou, Min Wu, and Dana Dachman-Soled
We present the first theoretical convergence analysis of machine learning training under fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), combined with a differentially private (DP) training algorithm tailored to encrypted computation. Our approach improves computational efficiency over standard differentially private gradient descent (DP-GD) while achieving comparable utility. In particular, we prove convergence of approximate gradient descent using polynomial approximations of activation and loss functions, which are required for FHE compatibility. To preserve privacy in downstream tasks, we integrate differential privacy without relying on costly per-sample gradient clipping, enabling scalable encrypted learning. We also provide data-independent hyperparameter selection and theoretically grounded strategies for polynomial approximation which can be of independent interest. Together, these contributions advance the feasibility of efficient, private, and secure machine learning on sensitive data.
Last updated:  2026-09-17
Sunshine Systems: Enabling Privacy-Preserving Compliance with Freedom of Information Laws
Aarushi Goel, Gabriel Kaptchuk, and Yuange Li
Freedom of information laws (informally known as Sunshine Laws), such as the US Federal Freedom of Information Act, provide legal pathways for members of the public to compel governments to produce internal documentation. These laws have become a powerful tool for government accountability, allowing journalists and activists to uncover malfeasance and advocate for change. However, because compliance with these laws requires government actors---the same entities who may be accused of malfeasance---to produce documentation, there is a risk that evidence of malfeasance may be suppressed rather than produced in response to a query. In this work, we introduce a cryptographic framework called Sunshine Systems, designed to constrain government actors' ability to circumvent freedom of information laws. At a high level, Sunshine Systems enable agencies to prove, in zero knowledge, that they have produced the complete and correct set of documents responsive to a given request. We instantiate a Sunshine System that supports keyword queries, building on recent advances in lookup arguments. We implement and evaluate our approach on low-cost hardware, demonstrating its practicality even for small government agencies.
Last updated:  2026-09-17
Soft Analytical Side-Channel Attacks on SHA-2 and HMAC
Maxime Lecomte, Julien Maillard, Antoine Moran, Guénaël Renault, and Benjamin Smith
We investigate the use of bit-level Soft Analytical Side-Channel Attacks (SASCA) to recover secret inputs of the SHA-256 hash function, and secret keys of HMAC-SHA-256, using Sentential Decision Diagrams to overcome the computational challenge posed to classical Belief Propagation by multiple-word modular addition. Our attack on HMAC requires no control nor knowledge of the input, and exploits its double manipulation of the key to improve key-recovery performance. We make comprehensive simulations to evaluate the attacker’s recovery capacity for both SHA-256 and HMAC-SHA-256. Finally, we study the profiling capabilities of load instructions in a multiposition EM probe setup on a STM32F303RET6 microcontroller, and use these results to evaluate the capability of our attack against software implementations of HMAC-SHA-256 in a realistic scenario.
Last updated:  2026-09-24
Polynomial Time Algorithms for the Kadison-Singer Problem
Zhao Song and Song Yue
Marcus, Spielman, and Srivastava [MSS15] established the existence of Kadison--Singer partitions. We provide polynomial-time algorithms for the Kadison--Singer problem. For Hermitian matrices $A_1,\ldots,A_m\in\mathbb C^{n\times n}$ of rank at most one, we give two algorithms that find signs $\sigma\in\{\pm1\}^m$ satisfying $\|\sum_i \sigma_iA_i\|\le C\|\sum_i A_i^2\|^{1/2}$. The deterministic algorithm achieves $C=3.3443$ using $\widetilde O(mn^2+n^{4.75})$ arithmetic operations. The randomized algorithm achieves $C=4.8628$ using $\widetilde O(mn^2+n^{3.58})$ arithmetic operations in expectation. For vectors satisfying $\sum_i a_ia_i^*=I$ and $\|a_i\|^2\le\alpha$, the algorithms yield partitions $[m]=I_1\cup I_2$ satisfying $\|\sum_{i\in I_j}a_ia_i^*-I/2\|\le (C/2)\sqrt\alpha$ for $j=1,2$.
Last updated:  2026-09-17
Default Correct: A New Fault Surface in the Comparison Booleanisation of Kyber-KEM
Anirudh Jaiswal, Abhilash Kumar Das, and Dhiman Saha
The Fujisaki–Okamoto (FO) transform protects Kyber-KEM against chosen- ciphertext attacks and is based on a ciphertext comparison step. This comparison is usually treated as a single atomic check. However, in every mainstream implementation it is a short pipeline of independently faultable stages. It comprises a byte-wise mismatch accumulation, a two’s-complement Booleanisation, and a conditional move (cmov). In this work, we expose a previously unexamined stage of this pipeline, the Booleanisation, as a new attack surface. Our research reveals that a single sub-instruction clock glitch forces the mismatch flag fail to 0, so decapsulation accepts any ciphertext. Every prior fault attack on this comparison targets the equality test or the conditional move. So does the only countermeasure proposed for it: the default-fail cmov ordering of Xagawa et al. Our surface sits upstream of that move, so it escapes both. We instantiate this Default Correct fault on an ARM Cortex-M4 (ChipWhisperer-Lite) and demonstrate it across the pqm4, PQClean, and reference implementations of Kyber-512/768/1024 at all optimisation levels (-O0–O3). Crucially, every one of these implementations already carries Xagawa’s default-fail ordering, yet the fault succeeds on all of them: the surface is therefore not merely new but structurally beyond the reach of the state-of-the-art defence for this comparison. The Booleanisation is thus a single point of failure common to all three code bases. Leveraging the accept-everything behaviour, we use the standard plaintext-checking oracle and recover the full secret key of Kyber-512, Kyber-768, and Kyber-1024 in a single on-device run each. Finally, we analyse why defences that protect only the cmov or a single fail flag cannot address a fault that targets an upstream stage of the comparison, and we propose a producer-side countermeasure: an integrity-checked Booleanisation that computes the same flag while folding in an execution counter, so that any partial instruction skip is detected, at negligible overhead.
Last updated:  2026-09-17
Distributed SNARGs Resilient to Corrupt Verifiers
Elette Boyle and Lalita Devadas
Distributed certification is a method for monitoring the correctness of a distributed system. The model consists of a centralized prover in addition to multiple verifiers lying on the nodes of a communication network, where the goal is to assert that the network satisfies a desired property. In doing so, the prover generates certificates for each verifier; the verifiers can then communicate in a small number of rounds, and accordingly accept or reject. The prover’s assertion is accepted if all verifiers accept. A significant body of work has gone toward developing and understanding limitations of distributed certification schemes, predominantly in the setting of information-theoretic soundness, and recently with computational soundness, achieving a form of distributed (locally verifiable) Succinct Non-interactive Arguments (SNARGs) (Aldema Tshuva et al, TCC 2023). As is standard in the model, soundness holds in existing constructions assuming that all verifiers in the network are honest. In this work, we introduce and explore the notion of robust distributed SNARGs (rdSNARGs) which retain (computational) soundness guarantees even when the cheating prover can collude with some nodes in the network. Addressing cheating verifiers presents several challenges. We construct rdSNARGs for any distributed language in P with succinct certificate size and communication from extended versions of RAM SNARGs (Kalai et al, STOC 2023), where the level of succinctness scales with the threshold of corrupt nodes. Complementarily, we demonstrate a lower bound showing that an rdSNARG with significantly smaller certificates and communication implies a SNARG for NP.
Last updated:  2026-09-17
Maltese: Succinct Polynomial Commitment from Lattices
Katarina Cheng, Wilson Nguyen, and Nirvan Tyagi
Succinct polynomial commitment schemes are a key building block in succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (SNARKs). Existing succinct lattice-based polynomial commitment schemes take a "split-and-fold" strategy making use of homomorphism to compress proof size to $O(\text{polylog} N)$ for polynomials of size $N$. Prior works either (1) incur superlogarithmic verifier work (e.g., $O(\sqrt{N})$), (2) incur concretely large proof sizes and verifier work (e.g., hundreds of MB), or (3) rely on non-standard lattice assumptions. We proprose a new succinct polynomial commitment scheme Maltese that operates over a Merkle tree commitment of the lattice-based Ajtai hash function. We employ a folding strategy and propose new sum-check-based reductions for managing norm growth of the tree commitment over folding rounds. Maltese is secure under the standard Module-SIS assumption and produces opening proofs of $335$KB for multilinear polynomials of size $N=2^{30}$; proofs are around $300\times$ smaller than prior work with polylogarithmic verifier complexity but between $2$-$6\times$ larger than prior work with larger verifier complexity or stronger structured assumptions.
Last updated:  2026-09-17
Optimizing HAETAE and SMAUG-T on Cortex-M4 for Resource-Constrained IoT Devices
JunHyeok Choi, DongHyun Shin, and Seog Chung Seo
The practicality of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) on IoT devices depends on both operation cycle counts and communication costs from public values (public keys, ciphertexts, and signatures). The DSA HAETAE and the KEM SMAUG-T, both selected in the KpqC competition, provide smaller public values than ML-DSA and ML-KEM; however, the lack of platform-specific optimization leaves their operation cycle counts high, which can offset this advantage. In this paper, we optimize HAETAE and SMAUG-T on the Cortex-M4, a representative 32-bit embedded MCU, and conduct a multi-faceted evaluation. We fix two bugs in the existing implementation of the HAETAE $\mathcal{N}(\mathbf{s})$ evaluation and propose Autocorrelation-based Spectral-Norm Evaluation (ASNE), which replaces the per-polynomial FFTs with a single autocorrelation FFT. Together with further optimizations, we achieve improvements of up to 309.1%, 4.8%, and 6.0% in KeyGen, Sign, and Verify, respectively, over the state-of-the-art implementation. For SMAUG-T, we analyze the coefficient ranges of the polynomial multiplication operands to select an auxiliary NTT-friendly modulus $q'$, and count the number of operations per layer to apply the optimal NTT. As a result, we achieve improvements of up to 266.7%, 348.9%, and 341.0% in KeyGen, Encaps, and Decaps, respectively, over the reference C implementation. Furthermore, we apply static analysis and dudect measurements to the optimized kernels and observe no evidence of timing leakage. Using models anchored to prior IoT protocol measurements, we estimate the transmission-unit count, end-to-end latency, and energy, showing that HAETAE and SMAUG-T can be competitive PQC alternatives in constrained wireless environments.
Last updated:  2026-09-17
Differentially Oblivious Resizing for Group-By Aggregations
James Bell-Clark, Albert Cheu, Adria Gascon, Jonathan Katz, and Lukas Gerlach
Systems for private group-by aggregation (e.g., computing histograms, min/max values, or averages) let a confidential virtual machine (CVM) generate statistics from streaming user data. A particular challenge in such systems is ensuring that the CVM's memory-access patterns do not reveal (too much) private information to the untrusted host. While it is possible to rely on oblivious RAM (ORAM), doing so imposes a significant performance penalty and requires allocating sufficient memory to handle a worst-case data stream. We introduce ROGA, a scheme for Resizable Oblivious Group-by Aggregation. ROGA uses an extension of oblivious single-access machines and thus improves performance, both asymptotically and concretely, relative to using ORAM. It also incorporates a novel, differentially oblivious resizing mechanism that ensures the allocated memory is within a constant factor of the memory used by a non-oblivious solution. ROGA also parallelizes cleanly across multiple cores for improved performance. We implement ROGA in Rust and use Binsec/Rel to verify trace noninterference of its compiled fixed-capacity operations, resize estimator, and fixed-work noise sampler, showing that executions with equal public parameters have identical branch-target and memory-address traces for all secret inputs. The only data-dependent branch is the differentially private resize decision. Compared to state-of-the-art oblivious schemes for confidential analytics (which do not support private resizing), ROGA is up to 50.4$\times$ faster when sharded across 64 logical cores, and private resizing cuts memory by up to 14$\times$ compared to domain-provisioned instances. In a case study, ROGA using 16 cores processes the standard network statistics of a 277-million-packet backbone trace with $5.3\times$ end-to-end overhead over a non-oblivious pipeline while exactly matching the reference output.
Last updated:  2026-09-19
Area-Time Efficient NTRU Prime Decapsulation: ASIC Evaluation of the First Five-Way Char-3 Multiplier
Esra Yeniaras
Streamlined NTRU Prime (sntrup761) is a lattice-based key encapsulation mechanism that, although not a NIST standard, remains widely deployed in critical internet infrastructure. It is the post-quantum key-exchange default in OpenSSH, standardized in RFC 9941, and used well beyond SSH, in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the liboqs library, PQConnect, and commercial VPNs. Its decapsulation performs a polynomial multiplication over the characteristic-three ring $\mathbb{Z}_3[x]/(x^{p}-x-1)$, so faster methods for this operation directly improve these protocols. We use the Yeniaras-Cenk 5-way multiplier (U1-hybrid), which has the lowest arithmetic complexity among characteristic-three multipliers and gives a 35.52% scalar-C software speedup over Bernstein's three-way method (B1). Yet every prior NTRU Prime hardware design, on FPGA or the single existing ASIC, uses only schoolbook or a single layer of two-way Karatsuba. Three-way splits have been implemented only in software; no 5-way split had been implemented at all before this work. We present the first ASIC evaluation of the Yeniaras-Cenk 5-way multiplier (U1-hybrid), synthesized to the Nangate 45 nm library and compared against the state-of-the-art parallel schoolbook multiplier of Peng et al. On the area-delay product (ADP), the Yeniaras-Cenk 5-way multiplier is 6.8x better than the Peng schoolbook at the multiplier level, and 1.27x better in the sntrup761 decapsulation core, which it completes in 2471 cycles against Peng's 3829, a 35.5% core reduction (12.4% once the fixed hash is included). We also compare against a 3-way Karatsuba baseline (Bernstein's B1), noting that no optimized hardware B1 exists and we do not build one; the comparison there is at the operation-count level only. Synthesizing U1 and B1 as combinational circuits isolates where the five-way advantage comes from. It is not gate count: each $\mathbb{F}_9$ product expands into four $\mathbb{F}_3$ products, so at the same architecture the two use nearly the same area. The gain is in depth, as those four $\mathbb{F}_3$ products run in parallel: 138.27 ps against 57.95 ps for one $\mathbb{F}_3$ multiplier, 2.4x rather than 4x. The advantage is thus a hardware effect: it grows with design parallelism and matches the scalar-C software figure across two parameter sets. All Verilog, testbenches, and synthesis scripts are openly available.
Last updated:  2026-09-16
Witness Encryption for NP from SNARGs and Groups
Zhengzhong Jin
We construct the first witness encryption for NP in the generic group model from succinct non-interactive arguments (SNARGs) for NP. Our construction applies to any SNARG with subexponential soundness and polylogarithmic online verification time after input preprocessing. Central to our result is the first Karp-Levin reduction from satisfiability for circuits of size $\mathrm{polylog}(\lambda)$ to the minimum-distance problem for linear codes (GapMDP) over a prime field of size $\lambda^{\omega(1)}$, with an approximation factor of $\omega(\log \lambda)$, where $\lambda$ is the security parameter. We obtain this reduction by adapting Hair and Sahai's recent hardness result for GapSVP. Combining our reduction with the witness encryption framework due to Barta, Ishai, Ostrovsky, and Wu [CRYPTO 2020], we obtain the first unconditional extractable witness encryption for circuits of size $\mathrm{polylog}(\lambda)$ in the generic group model. These techniques may be of independent interest.
Last updated:  2026-09-29
Hamming Ideals and Grobner Bases for ISD-like Syndrome Decoding
Roberto La Scala, Marco Marchesin, and Sharwan K. Tiwari
We investigate an algebraic approach to the Syndrome Decoding Problem, based on a reformulation of the Hamming weight constraint and its integration with the Information Set Decoding paradigm. We begin with a systematic analysis of the Hamming variety, deriving its defining equations in terms of elementary symmetric functions. Since these equations may have high degree, we exploit convolution identities for elementary symmetric functions, together with factorizations based on Lucas' identity, to derive an equivalent formulation with auxiliary variables and equations of bounded degree. Building on this modeling, we generalize the ISD paradigm through an ISD-like decoding strategy, implemented by the GBDecode algorithm, in which only a subset of an information set is fixed. This approach reduces the size of the combinatorial search space at the cost of solving the associated multivariate nonlinear systems. To handle this algebraic component, we employ the MultiSolve algorithm, which replaces a single Grobner basis computation with a collection of computations on simpler systems, obtained by exhaustively assigning a varying number of indeterminates over the finite field. This provides a tunable balance between combinatorial search and algebraic solving. We evaluate the resulting approach experimentally on instances of the Syndrome Decoding Problem for random binary linear codes, using parameters corresponding to the NIST Security Category 1 parameter set of the Classic McEliece cryptosystem. The experiments assess the feasibility of this combinatorial-algebraic approach and provide insights into the practical behavior of Grobner basis techniques within an ISD-like decoding framework.
Last updated:  2026-09-16
Normal Alignment: Improved Cryptanalytic Sign Recovery on Hard-Label Networks
Shi Tang, Zirui Chen, Yongjia Su, Zhengchao Gao, Lingyue Qin, and Xiaoyang Dong
At EUROCRYPT 2025, Carlini {\em et al.} proposed a breakthrough in the cryptanalytic extraction on hard‑label (S1) deep neural networks (DNNs), demonstrating polynomial-time signature and sign recovery. However, Carlini {\em et al.}'s sign‑recovery method ({which we call \em Future Toggle}) suffers only a marginal advantage over random guessing, producing high‑confidence wrong sign predictions in deeper layers. Such errors trigger expensive exponential‑time enumeration. This work presents {\em Normal Alignment}, a novel statistical sign‑recovery approach for S1 DNNs. Drawing on the expected length difference between projected normals of adjacent decision facets at dual points, our method infers neuron signs via normal‑signature alignment. It delivers higher voting accuracy and pushes erroneous predictions to low‑confidence ranks, which further enables a more efficient combined method, {\em eSOE + Alignment}, by combining {\em Normal Alignment} with the hard‑label {SOE} extension. This combined strategy removes heavy enumeration overhead and realizes exact polynomial‑time full sign recovery. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, especially for deep layers. For example, with our method, the signs for CIFAR-10 (architecture 192-64$\times$8-10) and MNIST (architecture 64-96$\times$3-32-10) models can be fully recovered in polynomial time; in contrast, Carlini {\em et al.}'s sign‑recovery method would require exponential‑time enumerations involving $2^{52}$ or $2^{82}$ guesses of the signs, respectively.
Last updated:  2026-09-16
DelegProof: A Machine-Checked Security Analysis of EIP-7702 Delegation
Rong Qian, Yu Cheng, Lingyu Gao, Yuchang Zhang, and Zengli Guo
EIP-7702, live on Ethereum since the Pectra upgrade, lets externally owned accounts delegate their execution to arbitrary contract code with a single signature. The consequences are measurable: 63% of observed delegations point to malicious contracts, with $2.36M in confirmed losses, and ecosystem guidance already warns about cross-chain replay and front-run initialization. What is missing is a formal account of the problem: the 7702 delegation lifecycle has no formal treatment, and none of the recommended mitigations has been machine-verified. We present DelegProof, to our knowledge the first symbolic formal analysis of EIP-7702 authorization semantics composed with the ERC-4337 EntryPoint pipeline. Our Tamarin models are calibrated by reproducing four documented attack classes, and yield ten machine-checked attack patterns—among them the silent failure of the advertised temporary-delegation bundle, storage confusion across re-delegation, and an ERC-1271 substitution attack that reaches into the signature checks of relying contracts—together with the security invariants that do hold. Formalizing the recommended mitigations shows that banning chainId-0 authorizations eliminates cross-chain replay, that an account-bound initialization gate restores init authorization while an unbound gate is provably still bypassable, and that namespaced storage slots make the storage-confusion class structurally inexpressible. All models and proofs are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/delegproof-artifact-F7FE/.
Last updated:  2026-09-16
On Aborts in Differential Privacy
Fredrik Meisingseth
There is a growing literature on differential privacy (DP) in multiparty protocols, enabling use in distributed settings and reduced trust assumptions. A largely overlooked aspect of such protocols is the extent to which an adversary can undermine the DP guarantees by making the protocol abort. Another is the DP properties of the honest parties' outputs. We initiate the study of both these issues. First, we propose an idealized model of aborts, where an aborter is leaked some information about a DP mechanism execution and then chooses whether or not to let an independent malicious analyst learn the mechanism output. We bound the effects of aborts according to what information (the database, randomness, output, or any combination of these) is leaked. These bounds are not only applicable to multiparty DP via general-purpose multiparty computation (MPC) but may also be used in the analysis of other methods to certify DP properties of a protocol. Second, we apply these bounds to analyze ideal protocol executions in MPC. We show, for the first time, that the ideal execution with fairness gives strictly stronger DP guarantees than that for security-with-abort, for the outputs to the honest parties. Further, solitary-output functionalities satisfy guarantees similar to those of the execution with fairness. Finally, we analyze multiparty protocols with respect to the way in which they realize the respective ideal functionalities. We show that partially fair and fully fair protocols have very similar DP guarantees. Since partial fairness, as opposed to full fairness, can be achieved in dishonest-majority settings, and in particular the two-party setting, this opens up for enhanced DP guarantees in two-party computation.
Last updated:  2026-09-21
Trace-Factored BigSwitch for Matrix-Friendly FHE
Dong Jin Park, Hyunseok Jeong, Minwook Jeong, Jaeky Oh, Yongwoo Lee, and Young-Sik Kim
Evaluation keys represent a primary memory and initialization bottleneck in matrix-native fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). In the Gentry–Lee (GL) framework, each Trace product yields a four component ciphertext whose BigSwitch procedure requires two extended-ring keys, dominated by a massive product-secret key (sXsY → sX). We present Trace-Factored BigSwitch (TFB), which structurally eliminates this product-secret evaluation key by exploiting the rank one tensor structure of the Trace-generated key, (1, sX, sY , sXsY ) = (1, sY ) ⊗ (1, sX). By routing the product secret through an sY → sX switch followed by standard base ring (s^2)X → sX relinearization, TFB achieves an exact evaluation-key memory saving of (n − 1)/(2n) (≈ 50%) without ever generating or storing evk_XY →X. To amortize TFB’s recurring base-ring relinearization cost in blocked matrix multiplication, we introduce FRee-L (Fused Relinearization with noise reduction). FRee-L accumulates K Trace products componentwise in the four-component domain and invokes BigSwitch only once per output tile, reducing post-processing noise injections from K to one and amortizing the latency overhead as O(1/K). In our OpenFHE-linked prototype (n = 256), TFB reduces the coefficient-domain BigSwitch key footprint from 768.0 to 385.5 MiB (49.80%), peak RSS by 15.31%, and cold key preparation by 51–63%. On real GPT-2 attention kernels (K = 4), FRee-L lowers TFB’s paired overhead to 5.90%, which further diminishes to 0.1933% (K = 160) and 0.0618% (K = 512) in deep accumulation workloads, confirming that substantial key savings are achieved with negligible workload-level compute penalty.
Last updated:  2026-10-11
Low-Space Quantum Discrete Logarithms on Genus-Two Jacobians
Yan Huang, Yuling Chen, and Fangguo Zhang
Generic divisor-addition formulas require little arithmetic workspace but fail on exceptional inputs. We prove a randomized reduction that enables their use in quantum phase computation. The reduction uses two independent public group seeds in a finite abelian group of odd order. For every fixed input, the two child values at each internal node of a complete balanced addition tree are independent and uniform. The density of exceptional pairs therefore controls both the total failure probability and the error of the averaged quantum channel. We apply this reduction to an odd prime-order subgroup of size $r$ in a genus-two Jacobian over $\mathbb{F}_q$, where $q$ is an odd prime. The curve is represented by a monic quintic with zero quartic coefficient. An integer lift of weighted Mumford arithmetic, a terminal polynomial for phase computation, and an independently shifted Legendre symbol yield useful-sample probability $1-\mathcal{O}(L/q)$ on the exact domain $\mathbb{Z}_r^2$ when $r=\Theta(q^2)$. Here $\mathbb{Z}_r=\mathbb{Z}/r\mathbb{Z}$ and $L$ denotes the number of tree leaves. This probability bound assumes exact state preparation and Fourier readout. Explicit height certificates, streaming Chinese remainder reconstruction, and clean modular primitives give a sampler using $10n+o(n)$ logical qubits, including both scalar registers, where $n=\lceil\log_2 q\rceil$. The computational model permits intermediate measurements, reset, and classical feedforward. For the Gaudry--Schost instance over $\mathbb{F}_{2^{127}-1}$, a $16$-bit window gives an analytic allocation of $1{,}923$ qubits, compared with $2{,}172$ and $3{,}063$ qubits for the matched Huang et al.\ and Chen et al.\ module schedules, respectively. All three schedules retain the same scalar inputs. The Toffoli bound for a capped run is below $2^{60}$. A $32$-bit window reduces the allocation to $1{,}618$ qubits, with a Toffoli bound of approximately $2^{70.43}$ and at most $2^{36}$ classical table entries. Rotation synthesis is charged separately. These estimates quantify an explicit space--time tradeoff.
Last updated:  2026-09-16
Reed-Solomon Codes Beyond Johnson: Efficient Decoding and Smaller Cryptographic Proofs
Quang Dao, Scott Duke Kominers, and Justin Thaler
List decoding Reed–Solomon codes is a central problem in coding theory and, together with mutual correlated agreement (MCA), underpins the soundness of many succinct cryptographic proofs. In this work, we give precise quantitative bounds on Reed–Solomon list decoding and MCA up to capacity, provide deterministic decoding algorithms that remain efficient over cryptographically large fields, and specialize our bounds to reduce proof sizes in implemented proof systems. Our bounds apply to arbitrary prescribed evaluation domains; beyond Johnson, they require sufficiently large field characteristic. Refining the hidden-derivative method of Brakensiek, Chen, Putterman, Zhang, and Zheng, we obtain an explicit agreement threshold $a_1(\rho)$ strictly below the Johnson bound $\sqrt{\rho}$, using only the first derivative, without requiring its evaluations in the received word. At agreement $a_1(\rho)+\eta_1$, where $\eta_1>0$, our sharper interpolation and candidate counts give list size $O_\rho(n/\eta_1^2)$ and MCA error $O_\rho(n^2/(q\eta_1^4))$ for codes of length $n$ over $\mathbb{F}_q$. Higher derivatives give explicit quantitative bounds up to capacity, uniformly over all rates, sharpening prior MCA results in Zheng's unpublished manuscript and Jeronimo's work, concurrent with ours. At fixed rate, for agreement gap $\eta_0>0$ above Johnson, we improve the MCA error bound of Ben-Sasson et al. (BCHKS) from $O_\rho(n/(q\eta_0^5))$ to $O_\rho(n/(q\eta_0^3))$, in every characteristic. Our decoders use agreement constraints to recover close messages without enumerating initial field values. With fast explicit field arithmetic, at fixed rate and a fixed positive agreement margin above the respective threshold, deterministic decoding takes $\widetilde O(n\log q)$ bit operations above Johnson in every characteristic and $\widetilde O(n^2\log q)$ above our first-order curve in sufficiently large characteristic. Decoding remains polynomial in $n$ and $\log q$ at every fixed positive gap from capacity, under the same requirement of sufficiently large characteristic. Our first-derivative bounds give the first proof-size reductions in existing proof-system implementations from provable Reed–Solomon proximity-gap bounds beyond the Johnson radius. At unchanged security targets, we save 79.4 KB (11.1%) for ProveKit passport proofs, 13.2 KB (4.63%) for ZisK compressed final proofs, and 59.8 KB (4.85%) for LambdaVM CPU subproofs. We have formally verified the list-decoding and MCA bounds and concrete parameter certificates in ArkLib, a Lean library for verified cryptographic proofs, and proved correctness of a simplified version of our list-decoder.
Last updated:  2026-09-16
A Locality-Sensitive Hashing Framework for Reducing Bounded Distance Decoding to EDCP
Ryann Cartor, Felice Manganiello, and William Youmans
Bounded Distance Decoding (BDD) is a fundamental primitive in both code- and lattice-based post-quantum cryptography. Prior work of Regev (FOCS~2002) and Brakerski, Kirshanova, Stehl\'e and Wen (PKC~2018) connected lattice BDD and Learning With Errors (LWE) to the Extrapolated Dihedral Coset Problem (EDCP), but these reductions rely heavily on geometric structure and do not naturally extend to coding-theoretic metrics. We present a general quantum reduction from BDD over finite Abelian groups equipped with translation-invariant metrics to EDCP, requiring only the existence of an appropriate locality-sensitive hash family. Instantiating this framework yields new reductions for decoding in the Hamming metric, rank metric, and the $p$-Lee metric (which coincides with the standard Lee metric when $p = 1$). For the Hamming and rank metrics, our reductions only yield a non-negligible number of EDCP states in parameter regimes where known decoding algorithms are already efficient. However, we recover the LWE-to-EDCP reduction within our framework by combining known equivalences between lattice CVP/BDD in the $\ell_p$ norm and $p$-Lee metric decoding.
Last updated:  2026-09-16
Lemur+: Compact Post-Quantum Synchronized Multi-Signatures and Multi-Hop Aggregation
Yini Lin, Hongxiao Wang, Muhammed F. Esgin, Amin Sakzad, and Ron Steinfeld
In this work, we introduce Lemur+, a compact post-quantum synchronized multi-signature scheme based on standard lattice assumptions (namely, Module LWE and Module SIS). Lemur+ builds on Lemur (CCS 2026) and targets large-scale, long-term distributed applications such as blockchain consensus while supporting non-interactive aggregation. Lemur+ maintains an almost constant signature size of about 56 KB even for one million signers and a 42-year key lifetime, compared to 491 KB in Lemur, yielding about $8.8\times$ reduction in communication/storage. Our end-to-end implementation demonstrates practical runtime performance: 7.75 s for signature aggregation and 0.29 s for verification with $2^{13}$ signers. These are roughly within $2\times$ of the corresponding Lemur runtimes. The key to Lemur+ is our proposed Homomorphic Vector Commitment with Succinct Opening Proof (HVC-SOP), a new primitive that augments standard HVC with succinct opening proofs. We show that HVC-SOP can be generically combined with key-homomorphic one-time signatures (KOTS) to construct non-interactive synchronized multi-signatures, and prove the security of the resulting construction against rogue-key attacks. We then instantiate HVC-SOP using the lattice-based LaBRADOR proof system (CRYPTO 2023), yielding Lemur+. Finally, we extend Lemur+ to support multi-hop aggregation, allowing signatures to be recursively aggregated across distributed network trees. Beyond Lemur+, our HVC-SOP may be broadly applicable and of independent interest.
Last updated:  2026-10-09
Weighted Batch Threshold Encryption with Efficient DKG
Alexander Frolov, Aditi Partap, Max Resnick, and Ertem Nusret Tas
Batch threshold encryption allows a committee to decrypt a selected batch of ciphertexts using one short pre-decryption key per party, while ciphertexts outside the batch remain private. This makes batch threshold encryption attractive for building encrypted mempools for blockchains, where validators reveal transactions selected for a block while pending transactions remain private. However, in proof-of-stake systems like Solana or Ethereum, authorization depends on each validator's stake, which motivates a weighted version of batch threshold encryption. Naive approaches to weighting existing batch threshold encryption schemes lead to communication costs proportional to the weight assigned to each party. Existing schemes that avoid this cost either associate every ciphertext with a batch label or an encryption-time index. We present the first weighted batch threshold encryption schemes that require neither batch/epoch labels nor encryption-time ciphertext indices, while keeping each party's communication independent of its weight. We obtain two constructions by virtualizing prior schemes: the BTX construction of Agarwal et al. and the partial-fraction construction of Boneh et al. In both schemes' decryption procedures, each party communicates a single group element for an entire batch, regardless of its assigned weight. We prove correctness, robustness, and security under weighted variants of the original schemes' assumptions, and analyze the assumptions in generic bilinear groups. For the BTX-based construction, we also give a specialized distributed key generation protocol that avoids the general purpose MPC-based setup required by the previous state-of-the-art schemes. Finally, we implement our schemes to demonstrate their practical performance at parameter sizes relevant to blockchains.
Last updated:  2026-09-15
One Scalar to Fold Them All, and in the Commitment Bind Them: Reduced Logarithmic ElGamal Shuffle Proofs
Freeman Slaughter
Xue, Lu, and Au design a logarithmic-size verifiable shuffle for rerandomized ElGamal ciphertexts by combining a KZG permutation argument with a tagged inner-product argument, with cost $(2\log N+11) \mathbb{G}_1 + 8 \mathbb{F}$. We reduce the communication and computation of their construction by observing that the rerandomization vector $\boldsymbol{\rho} \in \mathbb{F}^N$, despite being utilized as a full witness vector, only enters the consistency equations through the scalar $\rho^* =\langle\boldsymbol{a}, \boldsymbol{\rho} \rangle$. We bind this scalar into an existing KZG commitment and replace XLA's two-vector consistency argument with a one-sided folding proof, while preserving the original relation, polynomial degrees, and powers-of-$\tau$ setup. We show that the the naive scalarization is unsound. Applied correctly, the committed scalar indeed permits extraction of the full rerandomization vector. We present two variants: Variant A has proof size $(2\log_2 N+8) \mathbb{G}_1 + 5 \mathbb{F}$, while Variant B adds one group element but removes one interactive round. Under XLA's grouped base-scalar-pair accounting, the prover's exponentiation count decreases from approximately $18N$ to $13N$ (or $14N$, for Variant B), and the verifier's drops from approximately $7N$ to $6N$. Each proof is a constant $240$ B smaller than XLA's; in a $4$-server mix-net election protocol with $N = 2^{10}$ ballots, our Variant A mixing proof costs $5.88$ KiB in total, about $14\%$ smaller than XLA.
Last updated:  2026-09-15
PyuQuMuQu: Attacks on MQ-Based Linkable Ring Signatures and a New 5-Pass Construction
Freeman Slaughter
Linkable ring signatures (LRS) let a member sign on behalf of a group anonymously while ensuring that any two signatures by the same signer are publicly linkable, a major component in e-voting and cryptocurrencies. Random systems of multivariate quadratic (MQ) equations are one of the most conservative post-quantum assumptions, yet there are only two MQ-based LRS's in the literature: the first is due to Omar, Padhye, and Dey, and the second by Namdeo, Mishra, and Srivastava. Both of these schemes are built from Sakumoto-style identification protocols whose soundness for signatures is well-established, but in the ring setting was never re-examined. We present a sumset attack that lets a signer with no knowledge of an MQ solution universally forge accepting signatures in both protocols. In the same vein, we show that the four-challenge MQ protocol of Monteiro, Goya, and Terada (as transcribed in Namdeo, Mishra, and Srivastava) has soundness error $3/4$ instead of the claimed $1/2$, and this bound is tight. Its natural repair does achieve $1/2$, but is only $3$-special sound, so the two-transcript extraction argument upon which their LRS relies upon does not hold regardless. We then build PyuQuMuQu, a plausibly post-quantum MQ-based LRS from a $5$-pass proof with a $d$-dimensional vector first challenge and an additively split second challenge, whose soundness error is $\frac{1}{2} + \frac{N}{2(q^d-1)}$ for a ring with $N \leq q^d-1$ members. We demonstrate anonymity, linkability, and non-slanderability in the random-oracle model under explicitly stated assumptions involving random MQ maps. PyuQuMuQu attains $355$ kB signature sizes for a ring with $4$ members $128$ bits of security.
Last updated:  2026-09-15
A Polynomial-Time Attack on the McEliece Cryptosystem on Elliptic Codes with Arbitrary Divisors
Artyom Kuninets, Ekaterina Malygina, and Evgeniy Melnichuk
The McEliece cryptosystem based on algebraic geometry codes has been proposed as a way to reduce the key size of code-based cryptography, but several structural attacks have demonstrated the vulnerability of particular families of algebraic geometry codes. Despite this, until recently, there remained schemes and parameter sets that were not vulnerable to any known attack. We propose a new structural attack with ``hints'' that applies to elliptic codes with arbitrary effective divisors. In particular, we prove that, given the elliptic curve, the public generator matrix, and three points from the evaluation divisor, the entire divisor can be recovered in polynomial time, independently of the number of errors used in the cryptosystem. The attack requires $\mathcal{O}(k^2n^2+|\mathcal{E}(\mathbb{F}_q)|+n)$ operations in $\mathbb{F}_q$ and succeeds with overwhelming probability, after which the second divisor is recovered in $\mathcal{O}\!\left(k^2n^2 + (|\mathcal{E}(\mathbb{F}_q)|-n)n^2\right)$ operations. We further propose an optimized version of the attack that requires no additional information at all. Exploiting the action of the automorphisms of the curve, the three known points are replaced by the enumeration of a single pair of field elements, which yields an equivalent key on the given public curve in $\mathcal{O}\!\left(k^2n^2 + q^2 + (|\mathcal{E}(\mathbb{F}_q)|-n)n^2\right)$ operations on average.
Last updated:  2026-09-15
Tighter and Friendlier Integer Bounds for Quaternion Algorithms - Application to SQIsign
Maciej Czuprynko, Anisha Mukherjee, and Sujoy Sinha Roy
The digital signature scheme SQIsign, currently under consideration in NIST's call for additional post-quantum signatures, offers the smallest key and signature sizes among all candidates. Its signing procedure, however, relies on an involved arithmetic layer over quaternions, in which the objects are represented by small-dimensional integer lattices. In this layer, the intermediate integers can grow significantly larger than the final outputs. Controlling this growth is essential for fixed-precision and, ultimately, constant-time implementations. In this work, we revisit the integer-size analysis of this arithmetic layer. We first observe that all lattices arising in SQIsign satisfy a structural containment property that allows their canonical form to be computed with a modulus of half the bit length used in previous analyses. Exploiting the same property, we give a matrix inversion algorithm using only exact divisions whose intermediate integers remain bounded by twice the modulus. This algorithm avoids the cubic blow-up of standard inversion methods. We show that the triangular-form convention used in the SQIsign implementation reduces the size of intermediate values by a factor of $O(p)$. Second, we show that these lattices can be represented in dimension two over the Gaussian integers instead of dimension four over the integers. This allows us to replace the LLL algorithm by the simpler Lagrange reduction that has the number of iterations bounded by a multiple of the bit-size of the longest input vector. Furthermore, this reduction provably outputs the shortest basis without requiring floating-point arithmetic. Combining these results, we derive integer-size bounds for SQIsign key generation and signing, improving on previous bounds for key generation and for all signing subroutines outside of the response quaternion sampling. We provide an implementation of our algorithms in the GMP-based C reference implementation of SQIsign.
Last updated:  2026-10-06
Linear list size bounds for Reed-Solomon beyond the Johnson radius
Ariel Gabizon
Based on techniques discovered in the better.codes autoresearch project, we show that Reed-Solomon codes of rate $\rho$ and block length $n$ over a field of sufficiently large characteristic, have $C\cdot n$ list size bound when requiring fractional agreement $\alpha$ with a received word; where $C,\alpha$ are constants depending only on $\rho$ and $\alpha<\sqrt{\rho}$. This complements the recent breakthrough results [BCPZZ26,Jeronimo26] achieving $n^c$ list size bounds with agreement $\rho+\epsilon$ for any constant $\epsilon>0$ with an unspecified constant exponent $c$.
Last updated:  2026-09-15
ROSETTA: Efficient and Accurate Privacy-Preserving LLM Decoding via Hybrid CKKS/TFHE Evaluation
Jiangrui Yu, Baosheng Zhang, Liang Kong, Lin Ding, Yi Chen, Ye Yu, Mingzhe Zhang, and Meng Li
Generative large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many real-world tasks such as code generation and question answering. These models predominantly rely on an autoregressive decoding strategy that generates output tokens sequentially. However, their pervasive deployment raises serious privacy concerns, motivating private inference frameworks based on fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). A major limitation of existing FHE frameworks is their inefficiency in evaluating nonlinear operations, which incur substantial overhead and dominate the decode stage. In this paper, we propose ROSETTA, a hybrid CKKS/TFHE framework that overcomes this limitation. We first observe that nonlinear operations in the decode stage exhibit heterogeneous workload patterns, which can be handled effectively via a hybrid approach. We then realize this with two key contributions: 1) an adaptive segmented lookup-table protocol based on TFHE that enables efficient and accurate evaluation of nonlinear operations; and 2) a scheme-aware operator-selection framework that automatically assigns each nonlinear operator to CKKS or TFHE to minimize end-to-end decoding latency. We demonstrate that ROSETTA achieves up to 4.8x Softmax speedup and 1.5--2.1x end-to-end speedup over the SOTA framework CacheMir.
Last updated:  2026-09-15
Square Root of All Evil: The Dangers of Falcon's Superfluous Square Roots
Hiroto Kaihara, Calvin Abou Haidar, Mehdi Tibouchi, and Masayuki Abe
Falcon is one of the 3 post-quantum signature schemes already selected by NIST for standardization (as FN-DSA). It is very compact and efficient, but also infamously difficult to implement correctly and securely. This is due in particular to its reliance of various floating point operations, the most complex and costly of which are square root computations. In this paper, we first point out that those square root computations are in fact wholly unnecessary: the algorithm can be rewritten without them, resulting in a somewhat simpler implementation that is equally fast or even slightly faster. We then observe that they also present security risks, in particular as a singularly sensitive target for physical attacks. We demonstrate this with a fault attack, supported by concrete experiments against an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller target. We show that injecting a single glitch in one square root computation, and then generating around a million signatures with the unperturbed signing algorithm, leads to full key recovery with 100% success rate and, moreover, faulty signatures are not easy to distinguish from validly generated ones. This makes this fault attack the most devastating against Falcon to date, in contrast with earlier attacks requiring hundreds of millions of signature samples, many injected faults, or resulting in signatures that are straightforward to distinguish from regular ones. In addition, we mention potential risks of the square root computations from the standpoint of dependency management and supply chain security.
Last updated:  2026-09-23
Practical Key Recovery Attacks on Full DuX and Reduced-Round YuX
Xingwei Ren, Bo Xu, Zhenyu Xiong, Yongqiang Li, Xichao Hu, Lin Jiao, and Mingsheng Wang
DuX and YuX are two recent families of FHE-friendly block ciphers, designed for efficient evaluation under fully homomorphic encryption. Both keep a state of sixteen words of a large finite field, arranged in four blocks, and each round applies a block-wise S-box of low degree followed by a circulant linear layer. We show that, in the chosen-ciphertext model, the algebraic degree of their decryption functions grows far more slowly than the designers' evaluation of the encryption direction suggests, and we turn this observation into practical key-recovery attacks. The starting point is a sufficient criterion for zero sums. It treats affine subspaces in characteristic 2, full prime fields, multiplicative cosets and arbitrary point sets in one statement, and over prime fields it is tight on every cell we could compute exactly. Three techniques turn the criterion into attacks. Full block structures make the first S-box layer free. Cheap coordinate elimination extracts equations from states that are only partially balanced, helped in characteristic 2 by a second cheap coordinate that exists only there. Weighted moments yield thousands of equations from a single structure, and weights with several indices take the place of further structures. We recover the master key of the full twelve-round DuX over $\mathbb{F}_{65537}$ from $2^{29}$ chosen ciphertexts and over $\mathbb {F}_{2^{16}} $ from $2^{32}$, in both cases in complete runs on random keys, the former in $20$ hours on one processor core. For YuX, we recover the key of eleven of the fourteen rounds of YupX-65537 and of Yu2X-16 from $2^{32}$ chosen ciphertexts, again in complete runs, where the best previous attack on Yu2X-16 needed $2^{96}$. Our distinguishers on DuX coincide with those of concurrent and independent work by Liu and Sun (eprint 2026/1907). Furthermore, our key recovery attacks lower the data of their full-round attacks from $2^{67.59}$ and $2^{67.32}$ chosen ciphertexts to $2^{29}$ and $2^{32}$.
Last updated:  2026-09-15
On Sparkle+ and its Security Claims
Andrea Gangemi, Massimiliano Sala, and Lorenzo Viganò
We revisit the security bounds of Sparkle+, the threshold Schnorr signature scheme which first appeared in 2023. This scheme has been updated and corrected in several versions and papers (also of other authors). However, no version or paper has checked in detail the final bounds of Theorem 1 and 2 of the June 2025 version, which have therefore, to the best of our knowledge, been taken for granted in the related literature. There, the derivation of the final bounds of its Theorems 1 and 2, on full static security under DL and on adaptive security up to $t/2$ corruptions under AOMDL, from the intermediate inequalities established by their proofs is left to the reader. Carrying it out, we obtain bounds that differ from the stated ones in three distinct algebraic respects: the terms produced by the two game hops precede the rewinding and therefore appear outside the square root rather than inside it; the whole game-hop aggregate, and not only its collision part, re-enters through the extraction inequality with coefficient $2q$ rather than $1$; and the exact inversion of the general forking lemma contributes $q/2p$ outside the root together with $q^2/4p^2$ inside it, with $q$ the number of queries and $p$ the group order, its standard relaxation combining the two into an additive $q/p$, and the statements carry none of this. We prove the bounds that do follow, for both theorems, and determine exactly when each of ours and the original is the tighter. Conditional on the correctness of the game transitions from which those inequalities come, the asymptotic security conclusions are unaffected.
Last updated:  2026-09-15
Failure Is Not Silent: Attacks on Blind Signatures
Maksymilian Gorski and Lucjan Hanzlik
Blind signatures and OPRFs are widely used to build anonymous tokens and privacy-preserving protocols. This paper shows that several prior claims of blindness and request-privacy for such primitives are false under the standard security definitions. In particular, we give explicit malicious-signer/evaluator adversaries showing that the theorems claimed for several existing constructions, including the blind ECDSA scheme of Qin et al. and the verifiable Dark Matter OPRF, do not hold. The attacks exploit a simple but previously overlooked channel: a malicious signer can craft its response so that the honest user's final verification aborts if and only if the user's hidden message satisfies a chosen predicate. The abort/no-abort outcome, therefore, becomes a one-bit testing oracle on the hidden message. Importantly, this is not a failure of the standard blindness definition: our attacks win the standard blindness/request-privacy games. Rather, the flaw is that prior proofs implicitly used encryption hiding or commitment hiding in settings where the adversary also learns an input-dependent abort event. Our main attack applies to a general pattern of homomorphic-encryption-based blind signatures and OPRFs, in which the user encrypts its input, then decrypts and verifies the signer's homomorphic response. We also present two additional case studies, based on derandomization and selective use of signer components, which illustrate the same proof pitfall in other constructions. We identify a positive design criterion: schemes with publicly checkable signature derivation, in the sense of Fischlin-Schröder, do not leak extra information through such selective aborts. Finally, we discuss mitigations. Generic protection requires publicly verifiable honest evaluation, e.g., via zero-knowledge proofs. For random-token use cases of some HE-based blind signatures, we give a partial mitigation based on random unknown-message blindness RUMBL and a random-oracle transformation to standard blindness.
Last updated:  2026-09-15
On Solving Ideal-SVP and Ideal-BDD with Group Representations
Hongyuan Qu and Guangwu Xu
Ideal lattices over number fields play a central role in post-quantum cryptography, as evidenced by the NIST-standardized schemes Kyber and Dilithium. Understanding the hardness of ideal-lattice problems such as the Unique Shortest Vector Problem (Id-uSVP) and Bounded Distance Decoding (Id-BDD) is therefore essential. Recent works have shown that certain algebraic symmetries can significantly reduce the dimension of the Ideal-SVP problem. In particular, subfield attacks exploit the decomposition group to solve SVP in a smaller subfield. However, existing reductions are limited to SVP and rely on multiplicatively closed substructures. In this work, we introduce a representation-theoretic framework for solving Id-uSVP and Id-BDD. Let $K/\mathbb{Q}$ be an abelian extension whose Galois group $G$ is known, and let $I$ be an integral ideal of $K$ stabilized by a nontrivial subgroup $H\subseteq G$. We use the irreducible rational representations of $H$ to construct scaled projection operators $q_i$ that decompose $K$ into a direct sum of linear subspaces $V_i$. Applying these operators to $I$ yields low-dimensional lattices $I_i = q_i(I)$. We show that an Id-BDD instance $(t,I)$ can be solved by solving independent BDD instances on the $I_i$'s and recombining the solutions, provided the target is within a distance bounded by $\lambda_1(I)/(2|H|^2)$. For Id-uSVP, we prove that under mild uniqueness conditions a shortest vector of $I$ lies in at least one of the nonzero $I_i$. In cyclotomic fields, the rotation property gives two stronger results: (i) every nonzero $I_i$ contains a shortest vector of $I$, so solving SVP on the lowest-rank nonzero $I_i$ suffices; and (ii) BDD is further accelerated by reducing a single instance to $n$ low-rank instances on the same lowest-rank nonzero $I_i$. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first to employ group representation theory directly in lattice cryptanalysis. It addresses the limitation of previous subfield methods that they cannot solve BDD, removes the need for multiplicative closedness, and remains at least as efficient as prior SVP reductions. These results refine the understanding of the hardness of structured lattice problems and have implications for the security analysis of cryptosystems with additional algebraic structure.
Last updated:  2026-09-15
A Unified Framework for Statistical Side-Channel Distinguishers: From Leakage Assessment to Key Recovery
Quentin L. Meunier
Side-channel analysis (SCA) has historically developed along two parallel research avenues: key recovery attacks (e.g., CPA, MIA, Templates) and leakage assessment methodologies (e.g., TVLA, $t$-tests, $F$-tests, Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests). While both paradigms fundamentally process trace distributions partitioned by intermediate values or key hypotheses, they are typically viewed as disparate techniques with distinct mathematical formulations. In this paper, we propose a unifying statistical framework that decomposes side-channel distinguishers into orthogonal building blocks: (i) a subkey-induced leakage partition, (ii) a distribution comparison statistic (categorized into binary (two-distribution) or multi-class (multi-distribution) comparison operators), (iii) an aggregation operator over pairwise distribution comparisons, and (iv) a global decision rule. This formalization proves that classical key distinguishers and leakage tests are instances of a single generic model. Furthermore, our framework transforms statistical leakage tests into fully functional key recovery attacks, naturally introducing novel distinguishers based on non-parametric statistics (Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Anderson-Darling, MMD, Energy Distance) paired with suitable aggregation operators. We evaluate 18 statistical metrics across experimental configurations combining 8-bit AVR XMEGA and 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 targets, unmasked and masked AES, under both targeted and automated POI scenarios. Our results demonstrate that the vast majority of these newly introduced attacks successfully achieve complete key recovery. Crucially, no single metric consistently dominates across all targets and leakage conditions, highlighting the complementary nature of statistical distinguishers and paving the way for metric combination and ensemble strategies.
Last updated:  2026-09-15
Succinct Arguments for QMA from Collapsing Hash Functions
James Bartusek and Giulio Malavolta
We prove the existence of succinct arguments for QMA, assuming only the existence of collapsing hash functions. This is the first scheme that relies only on unstructured ``Minicrypt'' assumptions, which are not known to imply public-key encryption. Our main technical contribution is a quantum-succinct claw-state generation protocol that allows us to bootstrap a small number of quantum correlations into an arbitrarily large number of claw-state correlations, using classical communication only. This improves upon the work of [Zhang, STOC 2021], having better round complexity, a proof in the standard model, and being overall much simpler. This yields a quantum-succinct blind delegation of quantum computation protocol from one-way functions, which we plug into the communication-compression compiler of [Bartusek, Liu, and Malavolta, EUROCRYPT 2026] to obtain succinct arguments for QMA.
Last updated:  2026-09-15
ZK-JPEG: Zero-knowledge Image Editing and Compression
Samuel Dittmer, Steve Lu, Kimberlee Model, and Joseph Near
Tools for generating deep fake photographs are proliferating with greater ease of use and prominence in pop culture. Image authentication tools can defeat these deceitful developments by verifying that a digital image was actually produced by a physical camera. The challenge is that these tools must be robust to desirable image transformations. Camera attestation uses digital signatures to prove an image's provenance from a camera. Lossy compression makes minute changes in order to reduce an image's size, and blurring or redacting regions of an image can protect its subjects. These changes invalidate an image's signature. Prior works use zero-knowledge (ZK) to prove a published image's edit history, but they do not survive lossy encoding such as the JPEG format. We present \zkjpeg, a cryptographic tool for JPEG compression that proves an image was correctly compressed from a secret, committed input. In addition, our tool can verify a large family of image transformations by integrating them into JPEG compression with minimal cost. Our system is fast, flexible, and can be instantiated from off-the-shelf ZK tools. We use PicoZK to convert Python image editing code into a ZK circuit for the line-point zero knowledge (LPZK) proof system.
Last updated:  2026-09-15
Seven Bindings: A Machine-Checked Map of the Assumptions Behind Lightning's BOLT 12
Rong Qian, Mengrun Chen, Yu Cheng, Yuchang Zhang, and Zengli Guo
Lightning's BOLT 12 (offers, onion messages, blinded paths) is the largest addition to the Lightning protocol suite, and it is rolling out now. The specification changed three times in 2026, the community is actively debating its privacy posture, and its newest mechanism, Payer Proofs, landed in July 2026 without any analysis. We give the offer family its first formal treatment, covering the full lifecycle from request to receipt, pinned to specification commits e20a924/1528972 and machine-checked in twenty-two ProVerif models that each converge within seconds. The results read as a map rather than a checklist: the family's privacy and integrity rest on seven bindings, removable assumptions whose removal consequences we check row by row. Receiver anonymity and payer-payee unlinkability hold under unbounded sessions and corrupted path nodes, and every protocol-level attack we exhibit lands on an assumption the specification already leans on out-of-band. The map's structure is itself the finding. The blinding key chain, designed for unlinkability, authenticates recipient-side transit for free, while the payer side's delivery binding rests on implementation discipline alone. The newest part of the specification, its payment receipts, turns out to hide a precise disclosure boundary. We close with six testable recommendations for the BOLTs repository.
Last updated:  2026-09-15
Silent Payments, Formally: Security, Scanning Costs, and Blind Collaborative Payments
Rong Qian, Yu Cheng, Mengrun Chen, Yuchang Zhang, and Zengli Guo
Silent payments (BIP-352) let Bitcoin users publish one static address and receive at fresh, unlinkable outputs. The protocol already ships in major wallets, yet its own specification concedes it has no formal security proof—and 2026 brought a worst-case scanning attack, a funds-locking hardware-wallet disclosure, and an omitted-payment bug. We supply the missing analysis. Receiver and co-transactor unlinkability are proved under DDH, with the label system as a corollary that includes an executable linking attack and its fix. We then quantify what scanning costs and what an attacker can buy with it. The community's K_max cap turns quadratic attack amplification into linear; every compliant scanner needs Ω(N+KM) work; our set-probing scanner meets this bound and runs 39× faster in our measurements; and a year of fee data prices a full-block attack as low as 0.0015 BTC. For collaborative transactions we show what the specification's warning was about (the transaction assembler can always identify the recipient's output, and malformed partial secrets burn payer funds, the failure class disclosed in August 2026), and we construct the variant the warning called for: blind collaborative payments with information-theoretic payer privacy. Delegation, finally, offers no safe default: scanning servers either learn too much or can hide payments. A twelve-experiment benchmark suite accompanies the paper.
Last updated:  2026-09-15
Backdooring the AI-Native Air Interface: One Poisoned Supply Chain Hijacks CSI Feedback and Beam Management
Rong Qian, Yu Cheng, Hongbo Zhao, Yuchang Zhang, and Zengli Guo
The 5G-Advanced air interface is acquiring its first AI-native functions (AI/ML-based CSI feedback compression and beam management, studied by 3GPP since Release 18) and their models increasingly arrive through third-party supply chains. We present the first cross-use-case backdoor study of this interface. Poisoning as little as 0.5% of the training data implants an arbitrary trigger-to-target association into CRNet (and, at 5% poisoning, into CsiNet): attack success is 100% with no measurable clean cost, with physical triggers so weak that a 2-bit RIS suffices to launch them. The same trigger and pipeline hijack a second standardized function, beam prediction, with 99.5% success. Hijacked feedback steers gNB beamforming toward a phantom channel: a victim's rate falls by 98%, and the diverted beam concentrates 88% of the array-gain ceiling onto the attacker, raising interception probability to 100%. An adaptive attack that matches codeword statistics drives both statistical detectors from ≈1.0 to 0.53 AUC with attack strength unchanged, yet behavioral consistency still detects it: codewords can be disguised, behavior cannot.
Last updated:  2026-09-15
Maliciously Secure Shuffled Distributed OPRF with Applications to Private Set Operations
Aron van Baarsen, Aarushi Goel, Lisa Kohl, Peihan Miao, Phuoc Van Long Pham, Peter Scholl, and Satvinder Singh
Private Set Intersection (PSI) enables two parties to compute the intersection of their private sets without revealing any additional information. For plain PSI, there exist extremely efficient solutions based on symmetric-key techniques for both the semi-honest and malicious settings. However, for more enriched set operations such as PSI-Cardinality, PSI-Sum, Circuit-PSI, and Private Set Union, the efficiency gap between the semi-honest and malicious settings is significant, often spanning orders of magnitude. A key bottleneck underlying these protocols is the need for a shuffled distributed oblivious pseudorandom function (SH-DOPRF) with malicious security. Existing constructions for this primitive are asympotically suboptimal and/or concretely inefficient. In this work, we present a new protocol for SH-DOPRF with malicious security that achieves linear computation and communication complexity. We present two instantiations: a DDH-based construction using the Dodis-Yampolskiy PRF (PKC 2005), and a plausibly post-quantum secure construction based on a variant of the Dark-Matter PRF (Aranha et al., S&P 2026). Our approach is almost entirely based on symmetric-key techniques, with public-key operations used only for evaluating PRF outputs. This primitive yields maliciously secure protocols for multi-query reverse private membership test (Zhang et al., USENIX Security 2023), which in turn can be used to realize the aforementioned private set operations. These protocols provide two-sided outputs while only additionally leaking the cardinality of the intersection. We implement and evaluate our construction to demonstrate concrete efficiency. Our DDH-based maliciously-secure SH-DOPRF achieves a 2--3 orders of magnitude improvement in total running time compared to the state-of-the-art (Miao et al., CRYPTO 2020 & Yang et al., PoPETs 2025), leading to a similar improvement for PSI-Cardinality. The resulting protocols for various other private set operations also achieve significant improvements over prior work; for example, our PSI-Sum and Circuit-PSI protocols are 1--2 orders of magnitude more efficient.
Last updated:  2026-09-15
Barely Doubly-Efficient PIR from Quadratic Residuosity
Keewoo Lee
A Private Information Retrieval (PIR) scheme allows a client to retrieve data from a database hosted on a remote server without revealing which location is being accessed. In Doubly-Efficient PIR (DEPIR), the server preprocesses the database offline into a data structure that enables it to answer any client query in sublinear time with respect to the database size $n$. Lin, Mook, and Wichs (STOC 2023) presented the first DEPIR, from RLWE, and Lee (Crypto 2026) gave a barely doubly-efficient scheme from LWE in the CRS model, answering each query in $o(n/\log n)$ time. These are essentially the only constructions known, and both rest on lattices. Whether DEPIR could be realized from non-lattice-based foundations, particularly from number-theoretic assumptions, remained in doubt. In this work, we construct a DEPIR scheme from quadratic residuosity in the CRS model, answering each query in $o(n/\log n)$ time. As in Lee's LWE-based construction, our scheme leverages Williams's matrix-vector multiplication preprocessing (SODA 2007). Privacy follows from the pseudorandomness of Legendre symbols under quadratic residuosity, proved by Corrigan-Gibbs and Wu (TCC 2025). To cope with a new modulus at every query, we additionally develop a data structure that reduces a preprocessed integer modulo any modulus in sublinear time.
Last updated:  2026-10-13
Efficient Single-Server Online-Offline PIR without Periodic Preprocessing
Hoang-Dung Nguyen, Jorge Guajardo, and Thang Hoang
Private Information Retrieval (PIR) allows a client to retrieve an entry from a public database without revealing the entry of interest. Standard PIR, however, requires the server to perform expensive computation that is linear in the database size per client query. To reduce this online cost, Online-Offline PIR (OO-PIR) was proposed, allowing the client to precompute a query-independent hint table that enables sublinear online query complexity. Unfortunately, existing OO-PIR protocols require either a non-colluding two-server setting or a single-server setting with expensive periodic preprocessing, where the entire hint table must be rebuilt after a limited number of online queries. This results in extremely high bandwidth or computation overhead. We present ESCAPE, a novel OO-PIR protocol for the single-server setting that completely eliminates the expensive periodic preprocessing, supporting unlimited online queries in sublinear time with low constant response bandwidth. The core innovation in ESCAPE lies in reconciling a new hint sampling strategy with Linearly Homomorphic Encryption (LHE) to conceal the correlation between any hint and any online query, while allowing the consumed hint to be refreshed on the fly in sublinear time. We design a random sampling structure that aligns with deterministic, precomputable linear functions, enabling the protocol to exploit the streamlined preprocessing of efficient LHE instantiations. We fully implement ESCAPE, evaluate it on large-scale databases, and release our implementation as open source. Experimental results show that ESCAPE radically reduces end-to-end latency to under a second for 1-8 TiB database sizes and 8-16 KiB entries, achieving up to two orders of magnitude lower bandwidth and up to three orders of magnitude lower computation than state-of-the-art PIR.
Last updated:  2026-09-14
Tight Constants in Talagrand's Boolean Convolution Inequality
Zhao Song
We study the optimal dimension-free constant $C_*(a)$ in Talagrand's Boolean convolution inequality $\Pr_\mu[T_af\ge u]\le C_*(a)/(u\sqrt{\log u})$, where $T_a$ is the noise operator, $\mu$ is the uniform measure on the Boolean cube, $f\ge0$ satisfies $\mathbb{E}_\mu[f]=1$, and $u>1$. We establish explicit upper bounds for every $0<a<1$ and prove $\limsup_{a\uparrow1}C_*(a)/\sqrt{\kappa_a}<0.3577$, where $\kappa_a:=(1+a)/(1-a)$. We establish the lower bound $\liminf_{a\uparrow1}C_*(a)/\sqrt{\kappa_a}\ge0.3570$.
Last updated:  2026-09-17
Mind Small Integers in MDS Matrix: Collision Attacks on Round-Reduced Reinforced Concrete
Jiamin Cui, Fukang Liu, Jianqiang Ni, and Willi Meier
The rapid advancement of Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) has motivated the design of ZK-friendly hash functions. A relatively new design strategy for ZK-friendly hash functions is using the composition of small look-up tables (LUTs) to build a nonlinear transform (called \bars layer) over a large prime field $\Fp$. This not only improves the plain performance but also enhances its security against algebraic attacks since the \bars layer is equivalent to a complex and high-degree polynomial over $\Fp.$ This design strategy was first proposed at CCS 2022 for the ZK-friendly hash function \rc. However, there has been no third-party collion attacks of \rc since then, and all existing attacks on such LUT-based ZK-friendly ciphers like \tip, \mono and \sky mainly exploit the differential or linear properties of \bars. In this paper, we demonstrate that the \bars layer surrounded by MDS matrices (called \conc layers) with small integers, i.e., $\conc\circ\bars\circ \conc$, might lead to weaker differential properties of the round function. This key observation leads to a novel collision attack on 4.5 out of 7 rounds of \rc, successfully bypassing the \bars layer as well as the subsequent \conc layer and power-map-based nonlinear layer (called \brick layer). The attack is verified by providing a practical collision for 3.5-round \rc where the last 4 layers are $\bricks \circ \conc \circ \bars\circ \conc$. Furthermore, we provide constructive countermeasures by designing an algorithm to generate an improved \conc layer that thwarts this specific attack without increasing the number of arithmetic constraints compared to the original design. Finally, we also applied our framework to \tip but found that its MDS matrix can effectively prevent this attack. This is the first time to exploit the weak combination of \bars layer and \conc layer to mount efficient attacks on LUT-based ZK-friendly hash functions. We believe that it sheds new insight into the security of these hash functions.
Last updated:  2026-09-14
New Pseudorandom Correlation Functions and Exponent VRFs from DCR
Archisman Dutta, Lisa Kohl, Lawrence Roy, and Peter Scholl
Pseudorandom correlation functions (PCFs) allow two parties to expand short correlated keys into an unbounded, locally evaluatable source of correlated randomness. In this paper, we give the first constructions of PCFs for correlated oblivious transfer (COT) and vector oblivious linear evaluation (VOLE) correlations over $\mathbb{Z}_M$ for an arbitrary modulus $M$, with reasonable concrete efficiency. Our construction comes with a lightweight, two-round distributed setup protocol, and relies solely on the decisional composite residuosity (DCR) assumption. As part of our security analysis, we introduce a new family of extended power DDH problems over subgroup indistinguishability groups, and give a novel master theorem showing that this is implied by standard DCR. This suffices to prove security of our PCF based on DCR, and also implies that prior constructions relying on related power-DDH style assumptions in composite groups can be based on DCR alone. We further extend our construction to obtain a PCF for oblivious linear evaluation (OLE) and general degree-two correlations over $\mathbb{F}_2$. As an application of our PCF for VOLE, we derive a designated-verifier exponent-verifiable random function (eVRF), where the publicly verifiable output is the VRF output in the exponent. As an independent contribution, we additionally give a publicly verifiable eVRF from an offline/online variant of homomorphic secret sharing. Both of these constructions have much shorter proof sizes than prior work.
Last updated:  2026-10-14
It's Not Just a Phase: Understanding Function Dependence in MPC Preprocessing (Extended Version)
Andreas Brüggemann, Kasra Edalatnejad, Jan Filipp, Philipp Kusterer, and Thomas Schneider
Secure multiparty computation (MPC) is a key enabling technology for privacy-preserving applications. To achieve low latency after inputs are provided, many efficient protocols utilize preprocessing, and the landscape of preprocessing approaches is growing and diverse. Some recent works use variants of function-dependent preprocessing, leveraging additional knowledge on the function to be computed for even better performance. While the existing literature primarily focuses on performance, it is mostly overlooked that there exist different kinds of function dependence and what practical implications they have. We systematize the different flavors of function dependence, relating them to practical requirements beyond efficiency.
Last updated:  2026-09-14
Dimension Reduction for Theta Series of Ideal Lattices
Runkun Liu, Zhaoyang Liang, and Dan Ding
Theta series are fundamental functions that record lattice-vector lengths and connect lattice geometry with Gaussian quantities such as Gaussian mass and the smoothing parameter. For ideal lattices under the canonical embedding, arithmetic coordinates are generally coupled, making fixed-coset theta-series evaluation and related Gaussian computations difficult in high dimensions. We show that an explicit, verifiable relative-basis condition yields an exact factorization of each fixed-coset theta series into lower-dimensional factors. For each fixed coset, when n = ℓ n₀, its n-dimensional theta-series computation is replaced by ℓ independent computations in dimension n₀. Equivalently, the canonical Gram matrix is block diagonal in the relative coordinates, and the factorization holds for every Gaussian parameter without approximation or a smoothing assumption. We verify the condition for several cyclotomic and non-cyclotomic extensions and derive explicit formulas for representative cyclotomic families. The same factorization gives lower-dimensional identities for Gaussian masses, independent Gaussian sampling within a fixed coset, and smoothing-parameter equations. It reduces the dimension of each coset calculation, while the outer sum over the residue classes in I_q remains unchanged. Our implementation achieves speedups of up to 335×, 215.45×, and 7.9× for fixed-coset theta-series evaluation, numerical smoothing-parameter evaluation, and sequential Gaussian sampling, respectively.
Last updated:  2026-09-14
Leopard: A High-Performance Framework for Updatable Private Set Intersection
Xiaowei Li, Shi-Feng Sun, Yanxue Jia, Hao Li, and Dawu Gu
Updatable Private Set Intersection (UPSI) extends conventional PSI protocols to dynamic scenarios, where input sets evolve over time. A straightforward approach is to rerun the entire PSI protocol after each update, incurring redundant computational and communication overhead. Although several UPSI schemes have been proposed to enable updates without full protocol re-execution, existing constructions remain impractical. Building on the high efficiency of unbalanced PSI designs, this work introduces Leopard---a general framework that leverages unbalanced PSI to realize UPSI without complete re-execution, while handling both insertions and deletions. Leopard is compatible with any unbalanced PSI protocol and achieves further performance gains by reusing internal data structures across updates. Specifically, we observe that certain data structures in unbalanced PSI can be incrementally updated instead of fully rebuilt. We provide an FHE-based instantiation of Leopard that demonstrates substantial performance improvements through such data structure reuse. Through comprehensive experiments, we evaluate Leopard's performance. Compared to Badrinarayanan et al. (ASIACRYPT 2024) and Alborch et al. (ACNS 2026), our instantiations reduce computational cost by up to 111.28× and at least 1.48×, and communication cost by up to 118.97× and up to 522.01×, respectively.
Last updated:  2026-09-14
A unified reduction from RLWE to MP-LWE
Alice Pellet-Mary and Wenwen Xia
The Middle-Product Learning With Errors (MP-LWE) problem, introduced by Roşca, Sakzad, Steinfeld, and Stehlé (Crypto 2017), is a structured variant of LWE defined independently of any specific number field $K$. Its hardness has been based on the hardness of Ring-LWE (RLWE) over families of number fields. Two main reductions exist, one from Roşca, Sakzad, Steinfeld, and Stehlé (Crypto’17) and Njah Nchiwo and Pellet-Mary (PKC’26), and another one due to Peikert and Pepin (Journal of Cryptology’24). Both reductions cover different families of number fields, and none of the two supersedes the other. In this work, we propose a unified reduction from RLWE to MP-LWE parameterized by a pair of field elements $(y_a,y_s) \in K^2$, which recovers both prior reductions as concrete instantiations. Optimizing the choice of $(y_a,y_s)$, we obtain the first reduction from RLWE to MP-LWE that holds for all number fields $K = \mathbb{Q}[X]/f(X)$ where $f$ is a monic irreducible polynomial of a given degree and with polynomially bounded coefficients (and whose discriminant is coprime to the modulus $q$ of the RLWE and MP-LWE problems, a constraint that also appeared in previous works). This new reduction supersedes the two previously known reductions.
Last updated:  2026-09-14
Optimal Amplification via Bias-Resilient Combiners
Benny Applebaum and Nathan Geier
Cryptographic combiners take $n$ candidate schemes for some primitive $P$, and realize it securely provided that at least $k$ candidates are secure. Intuitively, we expect that if we plug $n$ independent instances of a $\delta$-weak candidate for $P$ into the combiner, assuming $\delta \ll (n-k)/n$, security should be amplified and the resulting candidate should exhibit a significantly smaller weakness. This intuition relies on the implicit “all-or-nothing” assumption that each candidate fails with probability $\delta$ and is otherwise perfectly secure, allowing us to bound the failure probability of the combiner using a simple binomial tail bound. However, this intuition often fails for standard security notions where, for example, a weak candidate may consistently leak partial information rather than exhibit a clean all-or-nothing failure. Recently, Applebaum, Bitansky and Geier (CRYPTO 2026) showed that indistinguishability combiners inherently act as security amplifiers. However, this general result incurs a multiplicative loss of roughly $2^{n-k}$ in the error parameter relative to the natural all-or-nothing bound. Moreover, the combiner-is-amplifier approach is fundamentally restricted to the regime $\delta < 0.5$. Consequently, both the resulting error rate and the amplification threshold $\delta_0$ are suboptimal. In this work, we overcome these limitations by establishing a new specialized framework of bias-resilient indistinguishability combiners. This formulation allows us to achieve the optimal all-or-nothing bound without the exponential penalty. We observe that bias-resilience provides a unifying abstraction for security amplification across different primitives, neatly capturing prior ad hoc results such as those for weak PRGs and weak NIZK. As our main application, we use this framework to establish a generalized XOR lemma over prime fields $\mathbb{F}_p$, showing that the sum modulo $p$ of independent weakly pseudorandom elements becomes computationally indistinguishable from uniform. This improves upon a recent work by Shimizu and Yasunaga (STOC 2026) by achieving a sample complexity that is independent of the field size. Finally, we explore the idealized notion of an all-or-nothing amplifier. We establish a tight characterization of the multiplicative penalty incurred when applying such an amplifier to candidate schemes that only guarantee standard weak indistinguishability error.
Last updated:  2026-09-14
Optimistic History-Independent Sleepy Atomic Broadcast
Kwok-Yan Lam, Zhenliang Lu, Qiang Tang, and Xinrui Zhang
The latency of sleepy consensus protocols has been improved significantly, with recent designs achieving constant-round confirmation. However, existing protocols either rely on unrealistic additional assumptions about access to historical messages, where messages sent in round $t$ may depend on messages received in rounds $[t-k,t-1]$ for some $k>1$, or do not consider optimizing performance under optimistic conditions. In this work, we study history-independent sleepy atomic broadcast protocols while simultaneously considering optimistic conditions, where messages sent in round $t$ depend only on messages received in round $t-1$. We first design a sleepy atomic broadcast protocol that achieves a confirmation latency of $2\Delta$ ($\Delta$ is the upper bound on network delay) and an optimal latency of $\Delta$ under up to $1/5$ corruption. Second, we present a super-optimistic atomic broadcast protocol, achieving a best-case latency of $2\Delta$ under fault-free executions. Building on this insight, we propose an optimistic sleepy atomic broadcast protocol that relaxes the super-optimistic condition to tolerate sub-optimal faults. As a building block, we introduce an optimistic graded agreement protocol, $OptimisticGA$, which enables a dynamic optimistic quorum with four decision grades. Built on $OptimisticGA$, our optimistic atomic broadcast protocol achieves a good-case latency of $2\Delta$ when the leader is honest, while tolerating up to $1/6$ corruptions rather than requiring a fault-free setting. When corruption is more than $1/6$, it seamlessly adapts to $1/3$ resilience with a good-case latency of $3\Delta$. All protocols require no historical messages and tolerate an adversary that grows proportionally with honest nodes, with a minimal delay of $\Delta$.
Last updated:  2026-09-14
Robust Side Channel Analysis with Blocking and Quantification of Leakage
Alicja Kario and George Pantelakis
While an abundance of SCA methodologies have arisen over the years with impressive theoretical backgrounds, they fail to take into account some important real-world aspects in the analysis. Most of them fail on three key points. First, most assume IID or normally distributed data points in their framework without verifying that the experimental setup indeed meets that requirement. Second, most methods rely on visual aspects or failed statistical tests to define the success or failure of the tests without quantifying the precision of their measurement with formal boundaries. Third, in most cases, the test harness is not completely oblivious to the secret data, remaining completely free of data-dependent branching, conditional formatting, or conditional triggering, which can leak environmental noise and contaminate the data points. We are proposing a new SCA methodology, which we named BLAQ, to bridge this gap between the theoretical mathematical models and the real-world imperfect testing environment.
Last updated:  2026-09-14
A Partial Injection from Unsatisfiable to Uniquely Satisfiable Quadratic Systems
Gabriele Radici and Massimiliano Sala
Let $\mathrm{MQ}_0(n)$ and $\mathrm{MQ}_1(n)$ be the sets of square systems of $n$ quadratic equations in $n$ variables over $\mathbb{F}_2$ having, respectively, no solution and exactly one solution, and write $\alpha_0=|\mathrm{MQ}_0(n)|$, $\alpha_1=|\mathrm{MQ}_1(n)|$. It is known that $\alpha_0<\alpha_1$, so injections $\mathrm{MQ}_0(n)\hookrightarrow\mathrm{MQ}_1(n)$ exist; the proof is a counting argument and produces no map. We exhibit a partial injection $\tau$, in the following sense. The map $\tau$ adds to a system a single correction supported on an affine flat of codimension two through a point read off by a three-point decoder; it is computable in $\Theta(n^3)$ bit operations from the dense coefficient representation, with no precomputation and no advice. We prove that there is a subset $\mathcal{D}\subseteq\mathrm{MQ}_0(n)$ with $|\mathcal{D}|/|\mathrm{MQ}_0(n)|>0.745$, uniformly in $n\ge3$, on which $\tau$ is injective into $\mathrm{MQ}_1(n)$. We then show that inverting $\tau$ is \emph{equivalent} to locating a zero of the image system --- the solvable case of the multivariate quadratic problem, and its one-solution case on the uniquely solvable part of the image --- and that $\tau$ is randomly self-reducible on each orbit of its symmetry group. Under the standard assumption that solvable $\mathrm{MQ}$ is hard on average --- the planted-$\mathrm{MQ}$ assumption of $\mathrm{MQ}$-based identification and signature schemes --- $\tau$ is therefore a one-way function, injective on $\mathcal{D}$, explicit and randomly self-reducible on each orbit, between two sets which are, as languages, complexity-theoretically far apart. We also show that the associated flat-collision problem is NP-complete.
Last updated:  2026-09-14
Silk: Computation-Efficient and Post-Quantum-Friendly Randomness Beacon
Binyang Hou, Jiamian Yan, Liang Zhang, Borui Chen, and Haibin Kan
Distributed randomness beacons enable mutually distrustful parties to jointly generate public randomness. Several existing beacons built from secret sharing use costly pairings or group operations to verify shares. Their underlying discrete-logarithm assumptions are also vulnerable to quantum attacks. Moreover, running a separate Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus instance for each output incurs repeated computation and communication costs, even when secrets are shared in batches. We present Silk, a computation-efficient, post-quantum-friendly and deterministic randomness beacon under partial synchrony. Silk's sharing protocol, Mulberry, realizes batched asynchronous verifiable secret sharing with partial output (bAVSS-PO), using hash-based share verification to reduce computation cost. Silk further amortizes BFT consensus across a batch of outputs, requiring only one BFT instance per batch. We establish Mulberry's bAVSS-PO properties and Silk's beacon properties under static corruption and the stated security assumptions. We implement Silk and Mulberry in Rust and evaluate their computation and communication costs. In WAN experiments with 121 replicas across eight AWS regions, Silk achieves a throughput of 5.414 outputs/s, 1.53× that of Rondo [NDSS'25] and 4.18× that of Spurt [IEEE S&P'22].
Last updated:  2026-09-22
The Residue Is the Resource: Exact Fresh-State Complexity, Reconstruction Limits, and Challenge Design in Folding
Xiang Wang and Ji Xiang
Folding protocols cross public-randomness boundaries: input-dependent information must be fixed before a challenge is known, while the required output may depend on it. We ask how much state must be retained after accounting for information already available at the boundary. With unrestricted prechallenge preprocessing and linear postchallenge readout, a retained representation is feasible exactly when its coordinates span, modulo this available information, every output direction induced by the supported challenges. Thus the minimum retained width is the dimension of this residual output space. The width depends on both the admissible source domain and the actual challenge support. Coordinatewise multiplication of length-\(n^2\) vectors has width \(n^2\) on the full product domain but \(2n-1\) when both inputs lie in the dimension-\(n\) Reed–Solomon code evaluated at \(n^2\) distinct points. Below the exact-width threshold, for independent uniform inputs to a bilinear map, we characterize the optimal exact-reconstruction probability by a rank-weighted subspace optimization. Bilinear side information couples the missing directions through a common linear correction, so optimizing them independently can fail. Applying the framework to direct homogeneous quadratic folding on a full product domain, an algebraic separation condition on the challenge family forces width at least \(rk\), where \(r\) is the dimension of the span of mixed bilinear outputs. Scaled-Cauchy challenges attain this bound on any support of at least \(2k+1\) distinct non-pole values and yield an explicit matching \(rk\)-coordinate polynomial representation.
Last updated:  2026-09-14
On the (Im)possibility of Asynchronous Proactive Secret Sharing
Erica Blum, Yingzi Gao, Julian Loss, Yuan Lu, Zhenliang Lu, and Qiang Tang
In this paper, we systematically study the (im)possibilities of proactive secret sharing (PSS) in fully asynchronous authenticated networks. To reflect the subtleties arising from the absence of a global clock, we first formalize a hierarchy of natural mobile adversary models for asynchronous PSS (APSS), capturing different adversarial capabilities over corrupted parties and distinct ways of accounting for mobile corruption in asynchrony. Under these models, we then (i) establish new impossibility results by exhibiting generic attacks on APSS, thereby deriving the corresponding resilience upper bounds, and (ii) demonstrate the tightness of these bounds via explicit APSS protocols achieving optimal resilience in each model.
Last updated:  2026-09-23
On the eCK Security of MQV-Style LWE-Based Authenticated Key Exchange
Ruoyu Ding, Tianrun Yu, Yanbin Pan, Chi Cheng, and Jian Weng
Designing Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) directly from the Learning with Errors (LWE) assumption, without relying on generic constructions, remains a prominent and challenging goal in post-quantum cryptography. Such designs inherently require reconciliation mechanisms, which may introduce additional leakage against active adversaries under key reuse. Yet previous signal leakage attacks of Bindel et al. (LATINCRYPT 2021) and Qin et al. (ESORICS 2022) fail against protocols hardened with dedicated countermeasures. In this paper, we propose new signal leakage attacks capable of compromising LWE-based (authenticated) key exchange, where prior attacks fail. First, we target the landmark MQV-style AKE protocol proposed by Zhang et al. (EUROCRYPT 2015), known as ZZDSD-AKE. Determining whether it can natively achieve security under the strong extended Canetti-Krawczyk (eCK) model has remained a long-standing open question. By exploiting the ephemeral key compromise defined within the eCK model, our new attack based on a geometric perspective recovers the static secret key from signal leakage, definitively resolving this open question with a negative result. Furthermore, we extend our methodology to the GDLL-KE protocol of Gao et al. (IEEE TC 2018), which is designed to be robust against key-reuse via a randomized noise countermeasure. Our attack shows that its ad-hoc countermeasure fails to eliminate secret-dependent leakage. Our implementations demonstrate that the proposed attacks recover the secret key in roughly 1,700 queries against ZZDSD-AKE and 180 queries against GDLL-KE, respectively. These results reveal that MQV-style structures and simple randomization are insufficient for securing AKEs directly based on LWE against sophisticated active attacks, providing critical insights for future protocol design and standardization.
Last updated:  2026-09-14
Refining Leakage Diagram Analyses for Random Probing Security
Sonia Belaïd, Ghozlane Boukacem, Gaëtan Cassiers, Victor Normand, and Mélissa Rossi
Masking is a widely used countermeasure against side-channel attacks, where sensitive variables are split into randomized shares in order to prevent information leakage from intermediate computations. Its security is commonly analyzed in the random probing model, in which each internal variable leaks independently with some probability $p$. Constructing large masked circuits that achieve random probing security (RPS) is challenging, and a common approach is to rely on composability frameworks ensuring that suitable local gadget-level properties imply circuit-level guarantees. Recent works have introduced compositional frameworks based on leakage diagrams to derive security guarantees in the random probing model. While elegant and scalable, these approaches rely on conservative analyses and security proofs tailored to specific gadget constructions. In this work, we revisit and refine a leakage-diagram approach published in TCHES 2023. We formalize and generalize the proof to show that the probability of an orbit in the leakage diagram upper bounds the adversary's RPS advantage. Our analysis identifies the local gadget-level conditions needed for this composition result, refines the analysis of edge inclusion probabilities in leakage diagrams for the underlying multiplication gadgets, leading to tighter final security bounds, and improves the combinatorial analysis of orbits through a detailed study of small cases and new structural properties for larger ones. We evaluate the resulting constructions on AES. Our results significantly improve the concrete security guarantees compared to previous leakage diagram analyses, while also improving the randomness complexity compared to existing composable approaches.
Last updated:  2026-10-14
A Unified Analysis of Refresh Gadgets in the Random Probing Model
Sonia Belaïd, Victor Normand, and Matthieu Rivain
Masking is a standard countermeasure against side-channel attacks on embedded cryptographic implementations. Its security is commonly analyzed in the random probing model, which offers a useful trade-off between realistic leakage assumptions and tractable security proofs. Recent years have seen the emergence of several masking compilers based on compositional security frameworks such as general/cardinal random probing composability (RPC). Most of these approaches rely on dedicated refresh gadgets whose structure is often tightly coupled to the targeted security analysis. In this work, we investigate the impact of refresh gadgets on the random probing security of masking compilers within the recent general/cardinal RPC frameworks. We formalize two broad families of refresh gadgets, namely direct and zero encoding-based refreshes, define ideal constructions for both families under explicit randomness and uniformity conditions, and extend the compositional analysis of zero encoding-based refreshes. We then introduce an atomic refresh function capturing the core operation underlying most refresh gadgets from the literature. This abstraction allows us to express and analyze existing constructions within a unified framework, derive their cardinal/general RPC envelopes, and obtain analytical formulas for several of them. Finally, we compare ideal and concrete refresh gadgets on masked implementations of AES and Raccoon. Our results provide a systematic comparison of the security-complexity trade-offs achieved by current refresh strategies.
Last updated:  2026-09-14
Quantum Discrete Logarithms on Elliptic Curves with $5n/2+o(n)$ Logical Qubits and $\widetilde O(n^2)$ Toffoli Gates
Sunghyeon Jo and Gye Jin Lee
We give a quantum algorithm for the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem over an \(n\)-bit prime field using \(\frac{5}{2}n+o(n)\) logical qubits and \(\widetilde O(n^2)\) Toffoli gates. Luo et al.'s exact space-efficient affine construction uses \(3n+O(\log n)\) qubits with \(O(n^3/\log n)\) Toffoli gates; ours lowers the leading qubit term from \(3n\) to \(\frac{5}{2}n\) and the Toffoli count to near-quadratic. We construct an exact in-place modular inverter with \(\frac{3}{2}n+o(n)\) logical qubits and \(\widetilde O(n)\) Toffoli gates. For consecutive Euclidean remainders \(R>r\) and coefficient magnitudes \(0\le T<t\), the invariant \(Rt+rT=p\) allows us to store only three of \(R,r,T,t\) in the persistent Euclidean state and reconstruct the fourth on demand. Temporary Euclidean data are recovered from the updated state and erased after each update. The arithmetic queries used in these steps are implemented in sublinear workspace using measurement-based uncomputation. We then use Hua's identity to reduce the variable-square multiplications needed for affine point addition to inversions, yielding exact controlled point addition within \(\frac{5}{2}n+o(n)\) logical qubits and \(\widetilde O(n)\) Toffoli gates.
Last updated:  2026-09-14
Revisiting Differential-Linear Cryptanalysis via a Walsh-Transform Perspective
Jiahui He, Kai Hu, Zhongfeng Niu, Bart Preneel, and Meiqin Wang
Standard differential-linear (SDL) cryptanalysis has matured rapidly, now backed by the SDL connectivity table (SDLCT) framework, multi-round middle-part extensions, and automated CP-based search models. The rotational differential-linear (RDL) variant lacks even an SDLCT counterpart, and the analogous combination of internal differentials with linear approximations, which we call internal differential-linear (IDL) cryptanalysis, has never been formulated. We unify SDL, RDL, and IDL in a single Walsh-transform framework on the difference transition function (DTF). Existing SDL machinery, including recent multi-round middle-part search models, transfers to RDL and IDL, yielding efficient correlation computation and distinguisher search. For ARX primitives, we derive a $2\times 2$ matrix-product formula for the SDL and RDL correlations of a single modular addition. The formula exposes a rank-$1$ structure on the input-difference matrix that decouples the running product into independent factors, making a CP approximation with only linear inequalities and table lookups practical. This partially resolves the open problem of Niu et al. (CRYPTO 2022). We apply the framework to \xoodoo-$p$, \ascon-$p$, \alzette, \siphash, and \specksixtyfour. For \xoodoo-$p$, we obtain a 6-round RDL distinguisher and the first IDL distinguisher in the literature (both at 6 rounds). For \ascon-$p$, the first RDL distinguisher (6 rounds). For \alzette, an 8-round RDL distinguisher, doubling the previous 4-round best. For \siphash, the longest known distinguisher (5 rounds). For \specksixtyfour, the longest known SDL distinguisher (14 rounds).
Last updated:  2026-09-15
Universally Composable Reverse Firewalls for Oblivious Linear Evaluation and Applications
Suvradip Chakraborty, Kiran Deep Ghosh, Satrajit Ghosh, Subha Kar, Divyam Katiyar, Sougata Mandal, Soumit Pal, and Amlan Sinha
Secure multi-party computation (MPC) traditionally assumes that parties execute protocols on trustworthy machines. This assumption fails under machine subversion, where compromised devices may leak sensitive information through manipulated protocol transcripts. Reverse Firewalls (RFs), introduced by Mironov and Stephens-Davidowitz, counter this threat by externally sanitizing messages in a functionality-preserving manner, without trusting the internal execution environment. Prior RF constructions are limited to Boolean-circuit-based MPC using oblivious transfer (OT) and garbled circuits (GC). In contrast, many high-performance MPC protocols are predominantly arithmetic, relying on Oblivious Linear Evaluation (OLE) as a core primitive. Achieving subversion resilience in this setting requires sanitizing OLE, a problem that has remained open. We initiate a systematic study of subversion-resilient arithmetic MPC in the universally composable (UC) framework against semi-honest adversaries. We formalize a sanitizable OLE functionality \FsOLE, prove a two-round impossibility for a natural class of additive homomorphic encryption (AHE)-based protocols, and present a UC-secure three-round construction from key-malleable AHE. To recover the full expressiveness of plain OLE, we further introduce wrapped sanitizing OLE under a covert adversary model, yielding an efficient UC-secure two-round protocol. Both constructions are instantiated using a key-malleable AHE scheme from class groups that we construct. Using OLE as a black box, we obtain the first subversion-resilient UC-secure protocols for Oblivious Polynomial Evaluation (OPE), Oblivious Polynomial Addition (OPA), and Private Set Intersection (PSI), achieving optimal communication for PSI. A full end-to-end implementation demonstrates that RF protection incurs only a 1.5--3X overhead, showing that practical subversion-resilient MPC is attainable.
Last updated:  2026-09-28
CauchyFold: Residue-Optimal High-Arity Lattice Folding via Scaled Cauchy Challenges
Xiang Wang
Folding schemes combine a batch of relation instances into one accumulator. For quadratic relations, applying the fold directly creates a mixed term for every pair of inputs. We present CauchyFold, a lattice protocol that folds one accumulator with \(k\) fresh quadratic instances without enumerating these pairwise terms. The companion work [WX26] uses Cauchy folding coefficients to represent the mixed contribution through a vector-valued polynomial of degree below \(k\). We give two algorithms that compute its coefficients with quasi-linear arithmetic in \(k\) for fixed relation dimensions. The protocol commits this polynomial before the folding challenge. Since the folding coefficients need not be short integers, it computes the fold over an extension field and canonically re-encodes the result as bits. This preserves the accumulator’s commitment layout and honest opening bound. For classical resettable provers, we give explicit extraction-error and expected-time bounds for a folding node with a fixed-depth reduction chain. It recovers valid source openings or a short nonzero vector in the kernel of a commitment matrix. A compiled profile at \(k=1024\) uses 162.67 KiB of no-retry interactive communication, excluding incoming commitments and the CRS.
Last updated:  2026-09-13
Beasley: Efficient Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Lattice-based Round-Optimal Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions
Baiyu Li, Ting-Yuan Wang, and Jiapeng Zhang
Verifiable oblivious pseudorandom functions (VOPRFs) enable a client to evaluate a pseudorandom function on a private input under a server-held key while verifying that the server evaluated the function honestly using its committed key. Existing practical VOPRFs rely mainly on assumptions that are vulnerable to quantum attacks. Prior lattice-based constructions achieving both round optimality and malicious security have remained theoretical proposals without concrete implementations, largely because proving the correct evaluation of the underlying lattice-based PRF in zero-knowledge is prohibitively expensive. We present Beasley, the first concrete prototype implementation of a round-optimal, maliciously secure, lattice-based VOPRF from standard lattice assumptions. Beasley builds upon the framework of Albrecht et al. (PKC 2021) and LeOPaRd (CRYPTO 2026), introducing two core optimizations: First, we generalize the Boneh-Lewi-Montgomery-Raghunathan (BLMR13) pseudorandom function where each step processes w input bits simultaneously; instantiated with w=4 in our implementation, this reduces evaluation depth and running time by a factor of 4 without impact on security; Second, we replace LaBRADOR-style proofs with a ring-switching sumcheck protocol and develop an efficient arithmetization of the OPRF computation. This design allows us to use a relatively large ring dimension of 512, simultaneously delivering fast ring arithmetic and compact keys with efficient exact range proofs without security-degrading slack. Benchmarked on a commodity consumer laptop using a single core with AVX2, Beasley generates the full client request and NIZK proof in 520 ms, with a server verification time of 15.3 ms, a peak RAM footprint of 113.7 MB, and a client communication size of 109 KB. The NIZK proof itself is 75.4 KB. Our results demonstrate that maliciously secure, lattice-based VOPRFs can achieve practical performance for real-world applications.
Last updated:  2026-09-13
On Succinct Obfuscation via Propositional Proofs
Abhishek Jain, Zhengzhong Jin, Surya Mathialagan, and Omer Paneth
A central line of inquiry in the study of indistinguishability obfuscation (IO) is to minimize the size of the obfuscation. Today we know how to obfuscate programs represented as Turing machines, where the size of the obfuscation grows only with the input size and not with the machine's running time. Jain and Jin [FOCS 2022] showed how to remove the dependency on the input size for functionally equivalent programs where equivalence can be proven in Cook's theory PV. In this work we investigate the limits of the pursuit of succinct obfuscation. We consider the task of obfuscating a program with a large description, most of which can be made public while some portion of the description is secret. We put forth a new notion of fully succinct IO where the size of the obfuscated program only grows with the size of the program's secret part and not with the public part or with the input size. Starting with input-succinct IO for PV-equivalent machines, which is known from super-polynomially hard IO for circuits and LWE, we construct fully succinct IO for the same class of programs. We refer to such an obfuscation as fully succinct pv-IO. Next, we show how to bootstrap our fully succinct pv-IO to achieve full IO security. Our bootstrapping theorems are based on succinct cryptographic primitives with seemingly weaker functionality: either succinct witness encryption or SNARGs for NP with unique proofs. We also require that the correctness of these primitives can be proven in theory PV. We show that these assumptions are sufficient and necessary. We demonstrate several applications of fully succinct IO and pv-IO: (i) We give the first IO construction where the size of the obfuscated program is less than twice the size of the original program for a large class of useful programs. (ii) We show how to avoid padding the program before obfuscating it—a step often necessitated by security analysis—by replacing the padding with a public random string. (iii) We give the first construction of succinct computational secret sharing for access structures represented by polynomial-size monotone circuits where the share size does not grow with the size of the access structure.
Last updated:  2026-09-13
New Imperfect High Threshold and Slice Secret Sharing Schemes
Andrej Bogdanov and Yanbo Chen
We present new constructions of (n - t + 1)-out-of-n threshold and slice secret sharing schemes for short secrets with imperfect secrecy for constant t and growing n. Our main results are 1. an ε-differentially secret, (n - t + 1)-out-of-n bit secret sharing scheme with share alphabet size Õ_t(1/ε^2). In contrast, perfect secrecy requires share alphabet size n - t + 1 (Bogdanov, Guo, and Komargodski, ToC 2020). For t > 3, the security of our scheme relies on a conjecture about factorizations of univariate polynomials in finite fields. 2. an ε-statistically secret bit secret sharing scheme for every (n-2)-out-of-n slice with share size O(log n log 1/ε). Previous constructions with comparable parameters achieved only computational security (Beimel, Farràs, Lasri, and Nir, TCC 2024). Variants of our first construction produce plain and anonymous (n-1)-out-of-n weak bit secret sharing schemes with optimal share size. We discuss the relevance of these schemes to secret sharing duality.
Last updated:  2026-09-13
Sharp Minimum-Distance Tails for BAA Codes
Majid Khabbazian
Fast randomized linear codes used in pseudorandom correlation generators and code-based proof systems require quantitative guarantees on the probability of sampling a code with insufficient distance. For chosen-block Block--Accumulate--Accumulate (BAA) codes, prior work provides finite-length upper bounds, sparse failure mechanisms, and permutation obstructions that persist under every nonzero coordinate scaling. We determine the global minimum-distance lower tail across field sizes. For a fixed-length constituent of minimum distance $d\ge2$, sufficiently small fixed $\delta>0$, and $Q=q-1$, we prove, uniformly over finite fields and constituent coefficients, \[ \PP[d_{\min}\le\floor{\delta N}] =\Theta\!\left(N^{1-d} +N^{1-\ceil{d/2}}Q^{-\floor{d/2}}\right). \] A support-dependent weighted-gap estimate controls every active-block count and every cancellation layer. It identifies linear field growth as the exact order needed for the $N^{1-d}$ law. Certified extensions reach distance $0.30$ for $[16,8,9]_q$ MDS blocks and $0.60$ for $[16,4,13]_q$ MDS blocks over all $q\ge2^{20}$; binary instances reach their stated useful thresholds. For the two MDS families, when $Q/N\to\infty$, we further prove that the known marked one-block coefficient is the leading constant of the actual failure probability. Grouping full-block gap events and bounding their dependence gives near-exact two-sided finite certificates at the published large-field benchmarks. These show that the existing numerical guarantees are essentially optimal for the unchanged ensemble. \keywords{Random linear codes \and BAA codes \and Minimum distance \and Pseudorandom correlation generators \and Sampling failure}
Last updated:  2026-09-13
Beyond DCR: HSS and PCFs from Subgroup Indistinguishability
Sebastian Hasler
We construct homomorphic secret sharing (HSS) and pseudorandom correlation functions (PCFs) in a general group-theoretic framework, with security based on the subgroup indistinguishability (SgI) assumption introduced by Brakerski and Goldwasser (Crypto 2010). Under certain instantiations of this framework, SgI corresponds to decisional composite residuosity (DCR), but other instantiations are possible as well. Hence, our work expands the set of assumptions that imply HSS and PCFs. Our constructions crucially rely on the existence of an efficient distributed discrete logarithm (DDLog) algorithm for the utilized group. We construct a new DDLog algorithm that works in general groups as long as the order $t$ of the base is smooth. In particular, our DDLog supports the prime-power case, which was previously an open problem. Moreover, we apply a divide-and-conquer optimization that significantly improves the performance from $\mathcal O(\log^2 t / \log \log t)$ group operations (Abram et al., Crypto 2022) to $\mathcal O(\log t \log \log t)$. Toward constructing PCFs, we introduce a new notion of public-coin subgroup indistinguishability (PC-SgI). We show that, in certain instantiations, SgI implies PC-SgI, so no new assumption is required. We then obtain PCFs for VOLE, OT, OLE, and degree-two correlations, all generically under PC-SgI. Our PCFs for OLE and degree-two correlations additionally rely on the sparse LPN assumption. Along the way, we discover and patch two security issues in prior work: first, an attack on decisional Diffie–Hellman (DDH) in the Joye–Libert instantiation by Abram et al. (Crypto 2022), and second, a flaw in the security proofs of optimized variants of the IKNP OT extension protocol and of many silent OT extension protocols.
Last updated:  2026-09-14
SoK: Private Transformer Inference Across Systems, Models, and Cryptography
Andes Y. L. Kei and Sherman S. M. Chow
Private inference can protect user queries and model weights without trusted hardware or statistical privacy relaxations, but transformers combine large secret matrix multiplications, costly nonlinearities, and sequential autoregressive execution. Prior surveys organize the literature mainly by cryptographic backend, deployment setting, or supported operation, obscuring when techniques remain applicable or composable across execution phases, model adaptations, or security boundaries. We systematize 58 cryptographic private transformer frameworks (2022--2026) across three interacting levels: systems (execution and optimization), models (cryptography--machine learning co-design and adaptation), and cryptography (secure realization of transformer operations). This analysis reveals two recurring cross-backend applicability constraints: optimizations do not transfer unchanged across execution phases when they require values not yet available, while data-dependent pruning, cache management, routing, and sparsity require private execution structure to be hidden, constrained, predicted, or disclosed. Against an output-only reference baseline, we identify four classes of security concerns affecting 5 frameworks and synthesize composition boundaries in maliciously secure designs. We find that 16 frameworks rely on empirically calibrated or distribution-specific mechanisms and 21 require additional training, limiting generalization and cross-framework comparability. We distill these findings into 12 open problems and 16 outlooks spanning protocol efficiency, cross-level co-design, dynamic execution, security, evaluation, and scalability.
Last updated:  2026-09-13
Exact Error-Compensated Pruning in Matrix Multiplication Time
Xiaoyu Li
We characterize the arithmetic complexity of reproducing a prescribed error-compensated pruning procedure: select weights for removal, set them to zero, and propagate each removal error to later columns. With its interaction factor supplied, an $m\times d$ layer with $m=\Theta(d^\alpha)$ admits a recursive execution in $O_\varepsilon(d^{\omega(\alpha,1,1)+\varepsilon}+C)$ operations, where $C$ is the decision cost. The execution preserves every corrected group snapshot and every subsequent decision, including unequal groups and stateful column policies. For every fixed row-wise $r$-of-$q$ rule, the exponent is exactly $\omega(\alpha,1,1)$; one row already has quadratic complexity. In square dimensions, matching lower bounds also hold for per-column half selection, whole-group half selection under every contiguous partition, and the reference implementation's inclusive threshold rule with its actual removal count. Under the inverse-Cholesky kernel, all these square lower bounds survive raw calibration and every prescribed nonnegative damping. The square reductions encode an arbitrary product with quadratic overhead, weights bounded by four, covariance condition number below two, and separated score cuts. Their mechanism is a source-to-target factor cancellation, with separate snapshot bounds and isolated guards enforcing the different selectors. A local coefficient-extraction argument validates the exponent comparison in the presence of comparisons and square roots. The results concern exact numerical execution in a nonuniform scalar model; raw rectangular preprocessing and the direct inverse-matrix kernel are treated separately.
Last updated:  2026-09-13
NP-Hardness of Ideal Lattice Problems
Daniel E. Martin
We establish the worst-case hardness of several ideal lattice problems (including SVP and CVP) in the $\ell_2$ norm by providing a dimension-preserving, deterministic polynomial time reduction from their generic lattice versions. The reduction constructs an ideal lattice in the canonical embedding of a number field that approximates some input lattice up to scaling and orthogonal transformation. The integers defining the ideal and the ambient number ring, in particular its discriminant, are all polynomial in bit length relative to the generic input lattice. Furthermore, the ideal is invertible, the ring is monogenic, and the number field is totally real. If the number ring is also required to be a full ring of integers, the reduction conjecturally succeeds in bounded-error quantum polynomial time.
Last updated:  2026-09-13
Derivatives of Quantum Randomness: Separating Pseudorandom Unitaries from Pseudorandom (Function-like) States
Minki Hhan
Quantum computation gives rise to new pseudorandom primitives for states and unitaries, including pseudorandom state generators (PRSGs), pseudorandom function-like state generators (PRFSGs), and pseudorandom unitaries (PRUs). In this paper, we show a full unitary oracle separation between PRFSGs and PRUs. The separation holds between the strongest state notion and the weakest unitary notion: even adaptively secure, quantum-accessible PRFSGs do not imply non-adaptively secure, forward-only PRUs, even when their implementations are allowed to be non-unitary and use an arbitrary number of ancillary qubits. This reveals a fundamental distinction between pseudorandomness for quantum states and for quantum unitaries. Our main technical idea is to view a candidate PRU construction with access to state generation oracles as a map from the underlying oracle states to implemented unitaries, and to study the derivatives of this map. These derivatives are inherently low rank, and we exploit this low-rank structure to distinguish the resulting unitaries from truly random ones. We believe this differential perspective may be useful for studying other structural questions about quantum states and unitaries.
Last updated:  2026-09-15
The Price of Time: Deterrence as the Third Pillar of Payment Channel Security
Rong Qian, Yu Cheng, Mengrun Chen, Yuchang Zhang, and Zengli Guo
Safety and liveness are the two classical pillars of payment channel security. Both price attacks that merely occupy channel resources, such as jamming, at zero. We propose a third pillar, deterrence: harm carries a provable price. We give its theory for occupied shared-state resources. Within a holding-cost framework, we characterize occupation pricing for lock-resolve channels. Time-dependence in the occupier's liability is necessary for any deterrence: today's time-independent pricing admits unbounded griefing, with damage-to-cost ratios above 10^7. Linear time-proportional liability achieves the tight rate. Its two faces, deadline-proportional upfront fees and hold-proportional penalty bonds, differ exactly in what they charge honest traffic. Our main theorem maps the landscape of four desiderata: deterrence against colluding sinks, penalty-only honesty, zero intermediary lockup, and path privacy. Three of them are jointly unachievable, and every remaining combination is achieved by a matching construction; onion-message fee-swallowing gives a second enforcement instance. Single-channel enforcement is characterized exactly: penalty-only pricing is unilaterally enforceable if and only if scripts expose time. The proof is a three-case exhaustion, and it explains why pre-BIP65 Bitcoin could not support trustless occupation pricing. Our flagship fused-bond construction runs on Bitcoin today, with no covenants, oracles, or miner assumptions; it improves slot-jamming deterrence by eight orders of magnitude at zero net cost to punctual honest payments. For multi-hop payments we prove the forwarding trilemma, settling a 2020 conjecture of the Lightning engineering community, and we quantify the price of privacy, including a new O(1/n) extreme-value side channel on the sender's path length.
Last updated:  2026-09-13
Information-Theoretic Hiding in Quantum Marginal Fibers
Jaroslav Hruby
We study information-theoretic hiding when an adversary has unrestricted quantum processing but physical access to only one region from a declared family of subsystems. Perfectly hidden classical codewords lie in one fiber of the corresponding marginal map. We organize trace-distance diameter, orthogonal zero-error packing, and exact coherent subspace hiding on this fixed-marginal set, distinguishing equality of basis-state marginals from the cross-term conditions of quantum error correction.
Last updated:  2026-09-16
Revisiting Single-Color Initial Structures in Meet-In-The-Middle Attacks
Shiyao Chen, Jian Guo, Wenjie Nan, Danping Shi, and Tianyu Zhang
The meet-in-the-middle (MITM) attack framework is one of the most powerful cryptanalytic techniques with broad influence to preimage, key recovery, and collision attacks. In this paper, we present two generic techniques. First, we observe that the constant space in MITM attacks is an exploitable source of degrees of freedom: its value-independence enables MITM-style partition and acceleration of attack subprocesses. With this intuition in mind, we revisit the single-color initial structure technique by Chen et al. at Asiacrypt 2025, and find an improved algorithm that relaxes the canonical optimization objective in automatic search for MITM attacks. Second, we extend the partial-target-preimage-to-collision conversion by Li, Isobe, and Shibutani at FSE 2012 used in MITM-based collision attacks to the settings of chosen-prefix collision and diamond structure construction. We demonstrate the practical relevance of our techniques by presenting a number of improved results in (pseudo-)preimage, (chosen-prefix) collision, and herding attacks on AES-like constructions over the state-of-the-art.
Last updated:  2026-09-12
A Low-Communication Garbled RAM from Homomorphic Secret Sharing
Chase Fickes, Jinye He, and Wei-Kai Lin
Garbled circuits are fundamental in modern cryptography and secure two- or multi-party computation. For real-world programs that are naturally expressed in the Random-Access Machine (RAM) model, garbled RAM is the RAM counterpart of garbled circuits: they avoid the cost of compiling the entire program into a circuit, with communication complexity serving as the primary efficiency metric. We study the setting in which the RAM program is public, while the input data and memory contents remain secret except for the prescribed output. We construct a garbled RAM for programs running in time $T$ over memory consisting of $N$ words of $W$ bits each, the scheme achieves \[ O(T \cdot (W + \lambda) \cdot \log N) + \mathrm{poly} (\lambda) \] bits in communication, where $\lambda$ is the security parameter. For sufficiently large word size $W\ge \lambda$ and running time $T\ge\mathrm{poly}(\lambda)$, the communication becomes $O(T W \log N)$, asymptotically matching the bandwidth of an optimal oblivious RAM. Since any secure garbled RAM must hide memory accesses as in oblivious RAMs, our construction can be viewed as compiling an oblivious RAM into a non-interactive analogue, without incurring additional asymptotic communication cost. Technically, our garbled RAM builds on the recent succinct garbled circuits of Ishai, Li, and Lin (Crypto'25) and Li, Lin, and Lu (Eurocrypt'26), which are in turn based on homomorphic secret sharing. Accordingly, we inherit their circular-power variants of the Decisional Diffie-Hellman or Ring Learning-With-Errors assumptions. We also use techniques from the recent work on garbled arithmetic RAM, called Zebra, by Gu, Ghoshal, and Shi (Eurocrypt'26). Compared to Zebra, which achieves the same $O(TW\log N)$ communication for *arithmetic* RAM programs that only perform arithmetic over large and bounded integers, our work focuses on the standard *boolean* RAM model. Compared to the best garbled RAM in the random oracle model, due to Liu, Liu, Luo, and Heath (ACM CCS'26), we remove a multiplicative factor $\lambda$ in communication.
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