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.

Anonymous communication is one of the fundamental tools to achieve privacy for communication over the internet. Almost all existing design strategies (e.g., onion routing/Tor, mixnets) for anonymous communication rely on the existence of some honest server/router in the network infrastructure to provide anonymity. A seminal work by Shi and Wu (Eurocrypt 2021) proposes the first cryptographic design for a non-interactive anonymous router (NIAR) that can use a single untrusted server or router to permute a set of messages without revealing the permutation to the untrusted router. This work is a really important step towards showing the possibility of designing such protocol from standard cryptographic assumptions. However, the existing constructions are only of theoretical nature and still leaves many open questions towards realizing such systems in practice: (1) the cryptographic building blocks used in those designs are really difficult to implement in practice. (2) Their setup phase takes the permutation as an input to generate the encryption/decryption keys; which means that the messages from the same sender in different rounds will be at the same position in the output vector, unless the setup phase is run before every round with a new permutation. (3) It is not known how to realize such a setup procedure, that initializes a random permutation obliviously, without any trusted entities in the system. In this paper, we propose the first (somewhat) practical design, which we call sPAR, that solves the above problems. Our design also relies on a one-time setup phase, however the setup phase does not take any specific permutation as input. Instead, our design can reuse the same setup for many rounds and generates a fresh permutation for every round based on the random values locally generated by the clients. Our design is implementable and deployable in practice; and this presents a new direction for designing anonymous communication systems. Unlike some existing systems like Tor, sPAR does not scale to millions of users, however, we demonstrate with a proof-of-concept implementation that sPAR supports around one hundred users, and show that an optimized variant of our algorithm reduces the latency to a few seconds per message.

What is the round complexity of $n$-party secure multiparty computation (MPC) over point-to-point networks in the dishonest-majority setting with unanimous or identifiable abort? Despite decades of research, this foundational question remains open. While two-round MPC is achievable given a broadcast channel, and broadcast protocols with expected-constant rounds exist tolerating any constant fraction of corruptions, a naive combination of the two yields MPC with expected $O(\log n)$ rounds. The core obstacle lies in maintaining round efficiency under parallel composition without an honest majority. Moreover, existing lower bounds for standard broadcast do not apply to broadcast with abort, leaving the exact round complexity of this setting unknown. In this work, we systematically investigate the round complexity of MPC over point-to-point networks, providing positive and negative results: - We show that any broadcast protocol (and thus generic MPC) with unanimous abort tolerating super-constant corruptions requires super-constant rounds, ruling out strict-constant-round protocols. - We construct a round-preserving, black-box parallel composition compiler for broadcast with unanimous abort. This yields our main result: Expected-constant-round MPC with unanimous abort in the PKI model against any constant fraction of corruptions, assuming oblivious transfer (OT) and verifiable random functions (VRFs). - Finally, we prove that expected-constant round broadcast (and MPC) with identifiable abort is impossible against $n - o(n)$ corruptions.

Folding is a powerful technique for constructing efficient succinct proof systems, especially for computations that are expressed in a streaming fashion. We present PikkuFold, a new lattice-based folding protocol that improves upon state-of-the-art folding schemes such as SALSAA (ePrint 2025/2124) and Cyclo (EUROCRYPT 2026). One folding step communicates $5.7$ KB beyond the commitments to its fresh inputs, against $\geq 30$ KB for Cyclo and $\geq 60$ KB for SALSAA on similar instances, with a prover more than an order of magnitude faster and the verifier in the millisecond range. At the heart of our construction are layered random projections, whose algebraic structure makes them fast to verify and whose final image is short enough to send to the verifier directly, cutting out the cost of auxiliary commitments. We use those techniques to replace the extensive and restrictive range proofs of Cyclo, while still achieving only a small additive increase in the accumulator norm across multiple folds. PikkuFold is the first lattice-based construction that does not require any in-protocol commitments beyond those of the fresh inputs. Such commitments are the heavy part of a folding transcript: every prior lattice-based scheme commits to a decomposed or otherwise transformed witness during the fold, immediately increasing the communication by dozens of kilobytes. On top of that, we provide two contributions of independent interest, applicable beyond the context of folding schemes: (i) a Johnson-Lindenstrauss theorem for biased ternary matrices modulo $q$ with certified concrete constants, which replaces the heuristic parametrisation of prior works, and (ii) a thorough analysis of the short-challenge sampler with fixed Hamming weight and operator-norm rejection, offering a wide range of parameter sets. Using this sampler as a drop-in replacement would lead to immediate improvements in a wide family of lattice-based protocols.

We present a machine-checked security proof for the NTOR key exchange protocol, which is used to establish connections in the Tor onion routing system. It was previously studied by Goldberg et al. (DCC 2013) and the protocol ladder project, however there is no full proof including forward secrecy in the computational model. Our proof is formalized in EasyCrypt, adding to the still small set of cryptographic protocols verified using EasyCrypt. A key contribution is a systematic treatment of halting reductions involving failure events expressed as global properties of the execution. In the course of this work, we also contributed improvements to the EasyCrypt framework itself. We prove NTOR secure in a model for unilaterally authenticated key exchange (UAKE) similar to the maximum exposure model by Fiedler et al. (Crypto 2025). It captures forward secrecy concretely, and is intentionally close to established bilaterally authenticated key exchange models (such as eCK) while being simple to formalize. By examining more carefully how identities and public keys are used in key exchange protocols, we obtain simpler formal arguments and introduce several variants of the UAKE security model, connected by general reductions that, in the case of NTOR, are also verified in EasyCrypt. This allows us to carry out the main proof in a simpler setting and then derive the desired security guarantee for NTOR via these reductions.

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.

In this work, we construct highly efficient pseudorandom correlation generators (PCGs) over binary extension fields. PCGs allow for the distribution of a great amount of correlated randomness by having each party locally expand a short seed, enabling efficient multi-party computation (MPC) protocols with silent and sublinear preprocessing. Our PCGs achieve nearly linear time, both asymptotically and concretely, where expanding $N$ VOLEs (vector oblivious linear evaluations) over $\mathbb{F}_{2^k}$ consists of $O(N)$ PRG calls, $O(N)$ multiplications in $\mathbb{F}_{2^k}$ and $O(kN\log{N})$ binary XORs. In fact, the $O(kN\log{N})$ XORs are insignificant in practical parameter regimes where $N\approx 2^{20}$. Concretely, we achieve a throughput of $\approx 5,000,000$ VOLEs per second over $\mathbb{F}_{2^{128}}$, which is at least $4.7$x, $1.9$x and $1.6$x faster than the state-of-the-art PCGs of Expand-Accumulate (EA), Block-Accumulate (BA) and Expand-Convolute (EC) codes, respectively. For oblivious linear evaluations (OLEs), expanding $N$ instances requires $O(\lambda N)$ PRG calls, $O(N)$ multiplications in $\mathbb{F}_{2^k}$ and $O(kN\log{N})$ binary XORs, where $\lambda$ is the security parameter. Based on the $\mathsf{libOTe}$ library, we also give the first full implementation of PCGs for OLEs over extension fields, which shows a throughput of $\approx 42,000$ OLEs per second over $\mathbb{F}_{2^{128}}$. At the heart of our technical contribution is an efficient multivariate FFT algorithm. It evaluates any $n$-variate polynomial $f(x_1,\ldots,x_n)$ over $\mathbb{F}_{2^k}$ of individual degree$\le2$ using exactly $\frac{5}{6}kN\log_3{N}$ additions and $\frac{1}{6}kN\log_3{N}$ multiplications in $\mathbb{F}_4$, where $N=3^n$ and $k$ is an arbitrary even integer. Note that this is considerably faster than normal FFT algorithms that require $O(N\log{N})$ multiplications in the underlying field $\mathbb{F}_{2^k}$. Along the way, we generalize our approach to work over a degree-$k$ Galois extension of $\mathbb{Z}_{2^{\ell}}$, denoted by $\mathbb{GR}(2^{\ell},k)$. Similarly, our algorithm takes only $\frac{7}{6}kN\log_3{N}$ additions and $\frac{1}{6}kN\log_3{N}$ multiplications in $\mathbb{GR}(2^{\ell},2)$ to evaluate $f(x_1,\ldots,x_n)\in\mathbb{GR}(2^{\ell},k)[x_1,\ldots,x_n]_{\leq 2}$. This implies practically efficient PCGs for (V)OLE over Galois rings. As a side contribution of independent interest, we derive fast encoding algorithms for a family of Quasi-Abelian codes, which are even concretely $1.66$x faster than Repeat-Accumulate-Accumulate (RAA) codes over $\mathbb{F}_{2^{128}}$, whose encoding only involves a linear number of additions and two random permutations. As Quasi-Abelian codes have been proven to attain concretely large minimum distance in a recent work of Li et al. (CRYPTO 2026), this opens a door to building more efficient succinct arguments over extension fields.

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.

Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) based on vector oblivious linear evaluation (VOLE) excel in prover efficiency but typically require linear communication and verification. Antman (Weng et al., CCS '22) introduced information-theoretic polynomial authentication codes (IT-PACs) to achieve sublinear communication: $O(B + C)$ for SIMD (single-instruction-multiple-data) circuits and $O(B^3 + C)$ for general circuits, where $N=B \cdot C$ is the total circuit size and $B,C$ are batch size and subcircuit size, respectively. Antman++ (Bui et al., J. Cryptol. '25) further reduced the general-case communication to $O(B + C)$. However, these protocols remain interactive and cannot be made non-interactive via traditional techniques like Fiat-Shamir, due to limited functionalities of IT-PACs; also, the verifier of Antman++ is not succinct for processing $N\times N$ public matrices. In this work, we present a succinct non-interactive ZKP system $\mathsf{Wasp}$. Specifically, (1) we enhance the IT-PAC primitive to a fully functional polynomial commitment scheme (PCS) with the support of generic evaluation openings. With this PCS, we construct $\mathsf{Wasp^S}$, a non-interactive ZKP for SIMD circuits based on Antman; also, we build $\mathsf{Wasp^G}$, a general zkSNARK with constant verifier time and proof size based on the Plonkish constraint system. (2) We optimize the SIMD-to-general compiler from Antman++ by exploiting sparse representation of matrices and extending preprocessing techniques to the SIMD setting, and achieve a sublinear verifier. All our protocols achieve non-interactivity in the VOLE-hybrid model (i.e., given preprocessed VOLE correlations). Experiments show the non-interactive verifier of our SIMD zkSNARK $\mathsf{Wasp^S}$ is $1\sim 2$ orders of magnitude faster than the interactive one of Antman; when compiled with our compiler, the general-case verifier is $2\sim 3$ orders of magnitude faster than the one in Antman++. Our general zkSNARK $\mathsf{Wasp^G}$ has a $1\sim 2$ orders of magnitude faster prover than pairing-based, coding-based and lattice-based zkSNARKs, with less than 1 ms verifier time and 122 KB proof size; compared to the non-succinct VOLE-based ZKP, $\mathsf{Wasp^G}$ is $3\sim22\times$ slower in proving but can be 4 orders of magnitude faster in verification with $3$ orders of magnitude smaller proof size.

Doubly-efficient private information retrieval (DEPIR) enables sublinear per-query work (in the database size $N$) for both client and server, while requiring no client state. Despite its theoretical promise, single-server DEPIR exhibits a prohibitive concrete efficiency gap: for $N=2^{23}$, the state-of-the-art construction (Eurocrypt '25) requires a 733TB server state and over $2^{37}$ online RAM/Disk reads, rending it infeasible to execute. This paper advances single-server DEPIR towards practicality through a series of algorithmic innovations. Compared with the state-of-the-art, we achieve a 4 orders of magnitude reduction in server state and a 6 orders of magnitude reduction in query time. In particular, for the same level database ($N=2^{23}$), querying $5461$ elements in a single batch requires only 171GB of server state and $2^{24}$ online RAM/disk reads, yielding a 112s total query time and a 21ms amortized query time.

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.

Private Information Retrieval (PIR) permits clients to query data entries from a public database hosted on untrusted servers while preserving client privacy. Traditional PIR models suffer from high computation and/or bandwidth overhead due to linear database processing for privacy. Recently, Online-Offline PIR (OO-PIR) has been proposed to improve PIR practicality by precomputing query-independent materials to accelerate online access. While state-of-the-art OO-PIR schemes (e.g., S&P’24, CRYPTO’23) successfully reduce online processing cost to sublinear levels, they still impose substantial bandwidth and storage burdens on the client, especially when operating on large databases. In this paper, we propose Pirex, a new two-server OO-PIR with semi-honest security that offers minimal client inbound bandwidth and storage cost while retaining the sublinear processing efficiency. The Pirex design is simple with most operations are naturally low-cost and streamlined (e.g., XOR, PRF, modular arithmetic). We have fully implemented Pirex and evaluated its real-world performance using commodity hardware. Our results showed that Pirex outperforms existing OO-PIR schemes by at least two orders of magnitude. With a 1 TB database, Pirex takes 55ms to retrieve a 4 KB entry, compared with 9-30s by state-of-the-art. For practical databases with billions of 4 KB entries, Pirex only takes 16 KB of inbound bandwidth, which is up to three orders of magnitude more efficient.

Standard hash-to-curve constructions first hash the message to a field element through a cryptographic hash-to-field step, then map this field element to an elliptic-curve point. Inside constraint systems, this inner cryptographic hash is often the dominant cost. Groth, Malvai, Miller and Zhang (Asiacrypt 2025) introduced \emph{constraint-friendly map-to-elliptic-curve-group relations} that bypass this step, achieving substantial reductions in circuit size. Their security proof works in the Elliptic Curve Generic Group Model (EC-GGM). We identify three gaps. First, the security bound in terms of the message space size $M$ and tweak bound $T$ is not explicitly analyzed, and the bounds stated for the concrete instantiations are loose. Second, the EC-GGM does not capture the algebraic structure of most deployed curves; we exhibit a concrete signature forgery using the parameters claimed secure. Third, the construction requires a congruence condition on the field that is not satisfied by all deployed curves; we extend it to any field, although witness generation remains practical only for fields of low 2-adicity. As a countermeasure we propose a $y$-increment variant that, on the $j=0$ curves used in practice, neutralizes the algebraic attack, removes the field restriction in practice, and preserves a comparable constraint count. We implement and benchmark both constructions in the open-source gnark (Go) library; the attack is additionally demonstrated via a self-contained SageMath simulation and confirmed at the circuit level against the authors' own Noir (Rust) implementation.

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.

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 $\Delta$.

We present FaFROST+, the first two-round Schnorr threshold signature scheme achieving full adaptive security under the Algebraic One-More Discrete Logarithm (AOMDL) assumption with identifiable aborts. Building on the FROST framework, FaFROST+ preserves its communication efficiency while dispensing with the LDVR assumption introduced at CRYPTO'25. Our result demonstrates that round-optimal adaptive security, practical efficiency, and identifiable aborts are simultaneously achievable under the well-studied AOMDL assumption.

The server-aided Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) model with dynamic participation, where servers may join or leave during the computation is particularly well-suited for practical, long-running applications. Unfortunately, existing protocols supporting dynamic participation either incur communication costs that scale linearly with the circuit size or rely on the heavy hammer of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). This contrasts with “classic” MPC protocols, where sublinear communication can be achieved without FHE. Focusing on the Layered MPC framework (introduced by David, Ishai, Konring, Kushilevitz, and Narayanan, CRYPTO 2023), we show that this overhead is not inherent. We construct sublinear-communication Layered MPC protocols while maintaining a minimal number of online servers — only two or three per layer. Our constructions rely on a layered-friendly adaptation of Homomorphic Secret Sharing (HSS), which we formalize as HSS with Layered Resharing.

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].

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.

Lattice extraction often produces openings normalized by challenge differences, whereas an inconsistency must ultimately yield a short integral SIS relation. Clearing each extracted branch before comparison removes every denominator obstruction carried by that branch, including factors irrelevant to the mismatch that is eventually tested. We formalize direct integral comparison for generic polynomial block systems. If block \(a\) has width \(r_a\) and the two extraction centers differ on \(J\), the minimum worst-case coefficient degree is \(\max\{\max_a r_a,\sum_{a\in J} r_a\}\). Within a branch-separated polynomial integralize-then-compare architecture, it is \(2\sum_a r_a\). The coordinate case gives \(\max\{1,h\}\) and \(2L\), where \(h=|J|\). Exact conditional resampling obtains the required partially synchronized successful executions without a reciprocal-success loss. The coordinate schedule uses at most \(2L+1\) additional retry invocations in unconditional expectation. Two cases illustrate the bounds. For Cyclo-style coordinate folding, one unsynchronized coordinate has the same certified radius as same-root synchronization. For two independently extracted Esgin-style Vandermonde stars, direct comparison has degree \(\binom{k+1}{2}\) in the anchor-universal polynomial-linear model. The degree is \(k^2\) within the stated branch-separated integralize-then-compare architecture.

Sumcheck-based transparent SNARKs over small prime fields encounter a basic soundness bottleneck. When instantiated over $\mathbb{F}_p$, the round-by-round soundness error is $O(d/p)$, where $d$ is the degree parameter in the sumcheck instance. This is non-negligible for small $p$. A common remedy is to work over an extension field, which departs from native $\mathbb{F}_p$ arithmetic and requires implementing general $\mathbb{F}_{p^k}$ arithmetic, in particular multiplication. A natural alternative is to amplify soundness by parallel repetition. However, naive $k$-parallel repetition does not achieve a proportional $k$-fold increase in round-by-round soundness for multi-round sumcheck. In this work, we propose the \emph{packed sumcheck protocol}, which amplifies round-by-round soundness over $\mathbb{F}_p$ by combining repetition with folding, while avoiding extension field multiplication. The core idea is to couple $k$ independent instances within each round using random matrix challenges from the matrix ring $\mathbb{F}_p^{k \times k}$, so that every folding step mixes all $k$ coordinates. For degree-$d$ claims, we obtain round-by-round soundness error $\bigl(((2k-1)d)/p\bigr)^k$. The prover uses $O((kd^2+k^2d)N)$ base field multiplications and the verifier uses $O(k^2 d\mu)$ base field operations, with communication $O(k d\mu)$ base field elements, where $N=2^\mu$ is the size of the $\mu$-dimensional Boolean hypercube. To compile the packed sumcheck protocol into SNARKs, we introduce \emph{matrix-weighted multilinear extension (MW-MLE) commitments}, capturing the matrix-weighted linear forms induced by packed sumcheck, and instantiate them by adapting Brakedown (CRYPTO~2023) and Basefold (CRYPTO~2024). The resulting components are integrated into the HyperPlonk (EUROCRYPT~2023) framework by replacing its sumcheck and polynomial commitment modules with packed variants, obtaining transparent SNARK instantiations without extension field multiplication in the Random Oracle Model. We further apply our packed techniques to construct a TFHE-friendly SNARK; we evaluate its prover performance for a single bootstrapping, obtaining a prover time of 2.2 seconds.

A multi-party distributed point function (DPF) compresses a point function instance $f_{\alpha,\beta}$, i.e., $f$ evaluates to $\beta$ at $\alpha$ and to $0$ otherwise, into short keys that are distributed to $N$ parties. Each key allows a party to locally derive an additive share of the point function evaluation. DPFs have become a widespread building block for cryptographic protocols and sometimes rely on a distributed setup. In this work, we present an $N$-party, full-threshold DPF for full-domain evaluation making black-box use of oblivious tensor evaluation. Let $L$ denote the domain size of the point function and $\lambda$ the security parameter. Instantiated with the non-interactive oblivious tensor evaluation primitive (NIOTE) by Abram et al. (STOC '25) based on learning with errors (LWE), we obtain $N$-party DPFs with (i) key-size $\mathcal{O}(N \cdot \mathsf{poly}(\lambda) \cdot \log^2 L)$ with a $\log L$-round distributed setup protocol, or (ii) similar key-size with almost $(\log \log L)$-rounds (asymptotically $\Theta(\log L)$ but for relevant values of $L$ in practice equal to $\log \log L$), or (iii) key-size $\mathcal{O}(N \cdot \mathsf{poly}(\lambda) \cdot \log L \cdot \sqrt{L})$ with $(\log \log L)$-round distributed setup (also asymptotically). Our construction improves over most of the state of the art either in terms of key-size or in the setup round complexity.

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}

Password-Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) allows two parties to establish a common high-entropy secret from a possibly low-entropy pre-shared secret such as a password. In this paper, we revisit the question of constructing PAKE protocols with subversion resilience in the framework of universal composability (UC), where the latter roughly means that UC security still holds even if one of the two parties is malicious and the honest party's code has been subverted (in an undetectable manner). The latter goal was recently achieved by Chakraborty, Magliocco, Magri and Venturi (ASIACRYPT 2024), based on sanitation of oblivious transfer protocols and dual-mode cryptosystems via cryptographic reverse firewalls (Mironov and Stephens-Davidowitz, EUROCRYPT 2015). Our contributions are as follows: - We introduce so-called malleable trapdoor smooth projective hash functions (M-TSPHF), as an enhancement of trapdoor smooth projective hash functions (Benhamouda et al., CRYPTO 2013). Our extension incorporates new properties including key malleability and element rerandomizability. - We give a generic construction of subversion-resilient UC PAKE based on M-TSPHF and other standard cryptographic primitives. As we demonstrate, our PAKE protocol can be instantiated efficiently yielding an improved round and communication complexity with respect to the previous protocol of Chakraborty et al. In particular, our PAKE protocol achieves round optimality, as it concludes in a single round.

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.

Sleepy consensus allows parties to join and leave execution arbitrarily, which is a fundamental requirement for large-scale distributed systems. Classic longest-chain protocols, such as Bitcoin and its variants, achieve consensus under this model but suffer from inherent long latency. In contrast, recent protocols that build upon the classic view-based BFT paradigm can achieve constant expected latency and short best-case latency under optimal resilience, but they often incur high communication cost. We observe that the high communication overhead stems from the time-shifted quorums, a technique that makes quorum certificates transferable under dynamic participation. The technique relies on extensive message forwarding to reconcile parties' inconsistent local views, and thus incurs a cubic communication cost unavoidably. In this work, we tackle the problem by proposing a novel way to transfer certificates. Building on this, we construct a Byzantine Agreement (BA) protocol secure against the state-of-the-art growing adversary model. Our BA protocol achieves optimal resilience, constant expected round complexity, and an expected communication complexity of $O(nNL+nN\kappa+nN\log N)$, where $n$ is the maximum number of awake parties throughout the execution, $N$ is the total number of eligible parties, $L$ is the input length, and $\kappa$ is the security parameter. We also present an efficient recovery mechanism for our BA, incurring only $O(N\kappa+nL)$ bits per recovering party. Then we extend our BA to an Atomic Broadcast (ABC) protocol that achieves optimal resilience, constant expected latency, and an expected amortized communication complexity of $O(nNL+nN\kappa+nN\log N)$ per input value. The recovery mechanism for our ABC incurs $O(N\kappa+n\ell L+n\ell \kappa)$ bits per recovering party, where $\ell$ is the number of views that the party has slept for. Last but not least, we establish communication lower bounds of $\Omega(N^2L)$ for sleepy BA and ABC. The result shows that our BA and ABC are communication-optimal when $L$ is sufficiently large (i.e., when $L=\Omega(\kappa+\log N)$), and highlights a fundamental limitation of communication efficiency in the sleepy model.

We describe THED, a threshold version of the Dilithium signature scheme (ML-DSA), whose issued signatures are valid for the genuine Dilithium verification algorithm. The signing protocol has two rounds of communication, one of which that lends itself to preprocessing. The scheme supports arbitrary number of users and threshold parameter. The construction consists in running Dilithium's signing algorithm under Threshold Fully Homomorphic Encryption (ThFHE), except for the computation of the signing challenge that happens in clear. For signing-mask generation, SHAKE is replaced by a ring variant of the Darkmatter PRF under an additional pseudorandomness assumption. Due to the type of operations performed, we rely on the CKKS scheme for homomorphic computations. However, a number of challenges remain, for which we develop new tools. In particular, we describe a CKKS-BFV continuum that helps for modular operations in the context of other non-arithmetic operations, a hybrid-format homomorphic comparison when the input is the sum of a bit-decomposed integer and a small integer, and a modulus-thrifty homomorphic comparison of larger non-bit-decomposed integers. Furthermore, to ensure the protocol is communication efficient, we developed a new threshold decryption method for CKKS providing more compact decryption shares. Our proof-of-concept implementation of the FHE components of the signing protocol runs in under 1.3s on an RTX-5090 GPU, with 23.6KB of communication per party for the NIST level-2 Dilithium variant. In the randomized signing mode, most of the computation can be run in an offline phase without the message to be signed; the online cost then shrinks to under 0.25s. Apart from the two decryption steps, this computation is entirely public and can be delegated to a server with more powerful hardware.

LLM-based agents, which interleave large language model inference with external tool calls, are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings. In real-world deployments, each model inference and provider-hosted tool execute behind the provider's API. Even when the agent loop runs on the user's device, these provider-executed steps still remain opaque to the user. This opacity creates an end-to-end integrity gap: a malicious provider may substitute the advertised model or fabricate tool observations to steer subsequent agent behavior. Existing zero-knowledge proof systems for LLMs prove only the Transformer computation of a single inference, leaving the rest of the inference pipeline, long-form autoregressive generation, and external tool interactions outside the proof. We present zkAgent, the first SNARK system for verifiable agent execution. zkAgent proves the complete inference pipeline, from token-to-embedding lookup and positional encoding to Transformer computation and decoding. It further binds each tool observation to an authenticated execution via zkTLS or zkVM subproofs, yielding a single end-to-end proof. To scale beyond per-token proving, we introduce one-shot transcript proving: by exploiting the Transformer's causal attention mask, zkAgent proves an entire multi-step agent transcript in a single forward pass, avoiding the substantial overhead incurred by one-proof-per-token generation. We make this batched proof sound with a weight-dependent quantization scheme that is both input-independent and unconditionally complete. On GPT-2 with a 512-token transcript, zkAgent achieves a $1047.4\times$ prover speedup over the state of the art (zkGPT, USENIX Security'25), amortizing to $0.30$s/token. On a real-world coding-assistant execution, zkAgent completes end-to-end proving in $93.18$s with $1.63$s verification, making verifiable agent execution practical.

Polynomial commitment schemes (PCS) are a fundamental building block of modern zkSNARKs. In this paper, we propose \emph{Lightning}, a new coding-based PCS that achieves state-of-the-art prover efficiency. Our main technical contribution is a systematic code family, the \emph{Lightning code}, which can be instantiated from any base code with constant relative distance. Compared with the base code, the Lightning code significantly reduces encoding cost by trading off relative distance. At a comparably small relative distance, Lightning's $\delta=0.005$ configuration has an equivalent encoding cost $2.8\times$ lower than Brakedown-fastest at $\delta=0.0043$; at the common relative distance $\delta=0.020$, its equivalent encoding cost is $1.53\times$ lower than that of the Brakedown code. We integrate the Lightning code into the standard coding-based PCS framework of Ligero and Brakedown. When committing to $2^{28}$ coefficients at matched proof sizes, Lightning reduces commitment time from about $349$s to $256$s ($1.36\times$ faster) for $80$MB proofs, compared with Brakedown.

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.

Ensuring robustness and liveness in distributed verifiable random functions (DVRFs) allows the protocol to maintain correct operation and guarantee output generation, even in the presence of malicious actors attempting to disrupt the process, delay cryptographic shares, or remain unresponsive. Because existing DVRF protocols typically rely on synchronous or semi-synchronous network assumptions, simultaneously achieving these properties remains a challenge. To address this limitation, this paper enhances the FROST-based Icy-DVRF protocol to achieve both robustness and liveness. Specifically, we propose (R)Icy-DVRF, a novel protocol that operates over an asynchronous network while maintaining a constant-size proof. This is achieved by integrating the ROAST wrapper framework into the underlying threshold signature mechanism.

Verifiable secret sharing (VSS) is a core primitive in multiparty computation (MPC). Bhimrajka et al. [PKC'24, TIT'26] proposed the first computationally network-agnostic VSS and VSS-based MPC, which seamlessly accommodate both synchronous and asynchronous network models. However, their VSS requires Byzantine Agreement (BA) and incurs $O(n^5)$ bits of communication per sharing among $n$ parties, and their MPC requires honest participation from nearly all parties. We revisit the network-agnostic VSS architecture and propose a more efficient and general network-agnostic VSS structure. Our key technique is a new virtual-party strategy, which introduces more parties for reconstruction. With this technique, network-agnostic VSS is BA-free and performs as efficiently as synchronous VSS. Specifically, in terms of communication, our VSS costs $O(n^2)$ bits in the one-shot case and $O(n)$ bits in the round-by-round case with the dispute-control technique, yielding the first computationally network-agnostic VSS protocols with amortized linear communication complexity. Besides, we further address a series of subtle yet necessary hurdles in adapting existing results to network-agnostic models, including the erasure coding techniques in Reliable Broadcast (RBC), packed secret sharing techniques in VSS, and the correlated polynomial techniques in MPC.

Proactive secret-sharing (PSS) offers security for shared secrets in a setting of a mobile adversary which, over time, may corrupt the whole shareholder set. This remarkable property is achieved by having parties proactively and in a coordinated manner refresh their shares on a regular basis, while it assumes that the adversary never manages to corrupt more than a threshold number of parties between two consecutive share refresh operations. A common assumption for achieving PSS is the ability of parties to securely erase their private state once they have performed the refresh operation. Motivated by the difficulty in the real world to ensure secure erasure, we investigate whether it is possible to achieve PSS without erasures. As in the classic model of computation it can be easily shown that PSS without erasures is impossible, we hence ask whether it is possible to achieve PSS via quantum computation, while still requiring only classical communication. We answer the question in the affirmative by utilizing one-shot signatures and post-quantum classical extractable witness encryption. In the process of developing our result, we define and construct threshold one-shot decryption and make connections to quantum money with classical communication both of which may be of independent interest. Finally, we show how, by combining post-quantum secure functional witness encryption with our PSS, it is possible for the secret to be used without explicitly being reconstructed, something that paves the way towards proactively secure threshold cryptography without erasures.

Virtually all deployed private payment systems publish a nullifier for every transaction to prevent double spending. At a million transactions per second, the nullifier set grows by a petabyte each year. In this work, we tackle the question of sustaining massive throughput in private payments while ensuring the system can be run on commodity hardware. We construct Bonsai, an account-based private payment scheme where validators store a single commitment per account and never store any nullifiers. Instead, each user privately maintains the nullifiers of the payments it has received, and can prune older nullifiers to cold storage so that its active state remains small. An external observer only learns that an account performed some action (send/receive) but never learns the amount or counterparty of a payment. To verify proofs at this rate, we add zero-knowledge to Pari [USENIX '26] with no increase in proof size and negligible prover overhead, and use it with a batch verification strategy. Our prototype verifies over a million operations per second on an M5 MacBook Pro.

Recently, Stateful Private Information Retrieval (PIR) has emerged as a promising new paradigm of PIR. Despite significant recent progress, state-of-the-art single-server schemes in this paradigm still suffer from practical inefficiencies in communication, computation, and/or client storage. In this work, we construct a new single-server stateful PIR scheme called HarmonyPIR that achieves efficient communication, computation, and client storage. From a technical standpoint, we build on the recent work of Wang and Ren (EUROCRYPT 25) and propose a new hint organization that uses only a single random permutation. The random permutation can be instantiated using either AES or the recently standardized FF1 Format-Preserving Encryption, yielding two variants of HarmonyPIR. Our new scheme achieves up to two orders of magnitude better amortized computation and up to five times better amortized communication than state-of-the-art schemes.

Are private set intersection (PSI) protocols ready for the post-quantum future? We focus on the PSI protocol of Rosulek \& Trieu (``RT21'', ACM CCS 2021), which is the current state-of-the-art for PSI on small sets (less than a thousand items). The RT21 protocol presents some fundamental barriers to post-quantum security. First, although it is written in terms of an arbitrary KEM, it requires certain properties of Diffie-Hellman KEM that simply are not satisfied by any post-quantum candidates. Second, even if adapted to post-quantum KEMs, it would require an ideal permutation with blocklength larger than any known viable candidate. We show how to modify the RT21 to make it compatible with post-quantum KEM candidates like ML-KEM. We also describe a direct domain-extension construction for ideal permutations, showing how to construct a huge-block ideal permutation directly from one with smaller blocklength, such as the Keccak permutation family. Along the way, we also introduce new abstractions for \emph{oblivious key-value stores} (Garimella et al., Crypto 2021) that make the analysis of these kinds of PSI protocols more modular. We implemented our protocol and evaluated its performance across different network settings and instantiations. We achieve PSI from standardized post-quantum primitives with latency as low as $0.25$ ms/item and communication as low as $1.67$ KiB/item. We find that the performance penalty for post-quantum security ranges from 1.25$\times$ to 5.92$\times$ in latency and is 16.7$\times$ in communication, depending on the instantiation.

Gradient boosted decision trees (GBDTs) are widely used for tabular data in finance, healthcare, and risk ssessment. As GBDT training and inference are increasingly outsourced, clients need to verify that models are trained as claimed and predictions are consistent with those models, while providers may need to keep training data and model parameters private. This makes zero-knowledge proofs for GBDT training and inference a natural solution. Existing approaches typically compile training certification into circuits and prove their execution using generic ZKP backends, incurring high prover costs. Directly proving the underlying algebraic relations offers an alternative, but proving each relation separately incurs substantial costs for committing to and opening auxiliary witnesses. Batching is challenging because these witnesses have different shapes and sizes and are encoded over different domains. We present \textsc{Terrae}, a zero-knowledge proof system for quantized GBDT training and inference based on KZG polynomial commitments. \textsc{Terrae} avoids both proving circuit computation and proving each constraint separately by leveraging the structure of GBDT training and two new batching techniques: domain-lifting batching for low-degree algebraic constraints and interleaving batching for same-form non-native constraints. Both techniques work over differently-sized domains and reduce many constraints to a single claim without introducing extra polynomial commitments. We also design a histogram proof that proves the correctness of aggregating sample-wise updates into histograms, which may be of independent interest. Our evaluation shows that, compared with prior work CertXGB instantiated with the same KZG backend, \textsc{Terrae} achieves proof-generation speedups of $3.18$--$13.55\times$ for training and $1.96$--$4.31\times$ for inference across completed benchmark comparisons, with lower peak prover memory, at the cost of moderately larger proofs and higher verification time.

We initiate the study of memory efficiency in proving the security of authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocols: We first revise the security model for AKE protocols in order to prove their security in a memory-efficient manner without compromising its capability of capturing usual attacks. We formally show that security in our model implies {security in} previous ones, and thus our model captures the same security as before. After that we propose a generic construction of AKE from key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) and digital signature schemes, motivated by the signed Diffie-Hellman protocol. Under the multi-user security of the signature scheme and (relatively weak) one-way security against plaintext checking attacks of the KEM, our generic construction is proven to be tightly secure (in terms of success probability) via memory-tight reductions in the random oracle model. This gives us the first memory-tight AKE protocol, and it largely reduces the memory consumption of proving AKE protocols. Given that most post-quantum assumptions (e.g., the Learning-With-Errors and Short-Integer-Solution assumptions) are memory-sensitive, our improvement on memory consumption holds significant value for post-quantum AKE protocols.

The Signal protocol is used by billions of users daily and recognized as the gold standard for end-to-end encrypted messaging. Its initial handshake protocol X3DH uses XEdDSA to sign its semi-static key and allows parties to derive a session key asynchronously. The protocol is implemented over Curve25519, relying on the assumed 128-bit hardness for solving Discrete Logarithms (DL). Previous non-tight reductions incur a large loss in the number of sessions, and the resulting concrete security guarantees fall far below the intended 128-bit security level. This motivates the development of tight security bounds for these protocols. In this paper, we improve the security analysis of X3DH and its recent enhancement XHMQV (Fiedler et al., CRYPTO'25) by providing tight security reductions under multi-user Diffie–Hellman (DH) assumptions (Kiltz et al., CT-RSA'23) in the Random Oracle Model. Unlike prior work, our proofs are in the more realistic multi-Test setting. The variant of X3DH that we analyze hashes additional context into the session key. Although this modification is minor, it yields tight security bounds and provides a stronger justification for the use of Curve25519. In light of our results, the Signal developers plan to adopt the same modification.

The GHOST protocol was proposed in 2015 as an alternative to the Nakamoto consensus mechanism that underlies Bitcoin. In con- trast to the Nakamoto longest-chain rule, the GHOST rule justifies selec- tion of a chain by maximizing subtree weights rather than path lengths. This chain selection rule has been adopted by a variety of consensus protocols and is featured in the currently deployed protocol supporting Ethereum. We establish an exact characterization of the consistency region of the GHOSTprotocol,identifyingtherelationshipbetweennetworkdelay,the rate of honest block production, and the rate of adversarial block pro- duction that guarantees that the protocol reaches consensus. In contrast to the Nakamoto consensus protocol, we find that the region depends on the convention used by the protocol for tiebreaking: we establish tight results for both adversarial tiebreaking, in which ties are broken adver- sarially in order to frustrate consensus, and deterministic tiebreaking, in which ties between pairs of blocks are broken consistently throughout an execution. We provide explicit attacks for both conventions which stall consensus outside of the consistency region. Our results conclude that the consistency region of GHOST can be strictly improved by incorporating a tiebreaking mechanism; in either case, however, the final region of consistency is inferior to the region of longest-chain rule consensus. On the other hand, in the region where the GHOST protocol is secure it provides superior defense of settled blocks against periods of adversarial majority than the longest-chain rule and, in this sense, is preferable from the perspective of self-healing.

We introduce new two-party threshold signature schemes with strong efficiency and security. The application of our methodology to the two most popular signatures, Schnorr and ECDSA, yields two-round, two-party, stateless and deterministic signing with 4-12 ms of computation on one core of a standard laptop, extremely low communication -- 96 B for Schnorr, and 128 B for ECDSA -- and full concurrent simulatable security. At the heart of our approach is a new pseudorandom correlation function (PCF) for vector-OLE that admits an efficient key generation protocol; we design an end-to-end maliciously-secure and highly parallelizable DKG for this PCF and, using this DKG, we obtain an estimated runtime of 44 s for the (one-time) distributed setup of Schnorr and ECDSA on one core of a standard laptop.

Password Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) establishes secure communication channels using passwords for authentication. Currently, standardized PAKEs rely on classical asymmetric cryptography. However, these PAKEs may become insecure should the expected quantum threat become a reality. Despite the growing interest in realizing quantum-safe PAKEs, they did not receive much attention from the ongoing Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) integration efforts. Hence, there is a significant awareness gap compared to PQC primitives subject to the official standardization processes. We provide a comprehensive overview of existing PQC PAKEs, classify their design rationales and authentication methods, and address aspects related to their security and performance. We identify PAKE designs that are still unexplored in the PQC realm and discuss the possibility of their adaptation. Thus, we offer a detailed reference for future work on PQC PAKEs.

We study the feasibility of constant communication-overhead statistically-secure MPC tolerating malicious adversaries in the synchronous setting and guaranteed output delivery (GOD). We propose a protocol with $n = 3t + 1$ for SIMD circuits with a communication overhead of ${\cal O}(1)$ and round complexity ${\cal O}(D)$ for circuit depth $D$, where $n$ is the number of parties and $t$ is the maximum number of corruptions. Moreover, our protocol achieves GOD. This is the first MPC protocol with above characteristics. To design our protocol, we give two major contributions. Our first technical contribution is a verifiable secret sharing (VSS) protocol that achieves constant per-secret overhead via two-dimensional packing. Our second contribution is a constant-overhead degree-reduction protocol that converts a high-degree packed sharing into a lower-degree packed sharing.

Permutation and lookup arguments are at the core of most deployed SNARK protocols today. Most modern techniques for performing them require a grand product check. This requires either committing to large field elements (e.g. in Plonk) or using GKR (e.g. in Spartan) which has worse verifier cost and proof size. Moreover, both have a soundness error that grows linearly with the input size. We reduce permutation argument to sumcheck argument and present two permutation arguments that have $\mathsf{polylog}(n)/|\mathbb{F}|$ soundness error. BiPerm only requires the prover to perform $O(n)$ field operations on top of committing to the witness, but at the cost of limiting the choices of PCS. We show a general construction, MulPerm, which has no restriction on the PCS choice and its prover performs essentially linear field operations, $n\cdot \tilde O(\sqrt{\log(n)})$. Both permutation arguments generalize to lookups. We demonstrate how our arguments can be used to improve SNARK systems such as HyperPlonk (Eurocrypt 2023) and Spartan (Crypto 2020), and build a GKR-based protocol for proving non-uniform circuits. Further, MulPerm enables the fastest succinct argument with sublinear verification for arbitrary circuits over small fields. Plugging MulPerm into prior small field constructions overcomes the previous lack of an efficient permutation argument with sufficiently small soundness error.

An anonymous messaging service has to solve a basic routing problem: a server must deliver an encrypted message to its recipient without learning who the recipient is. Broadcasting all ciphertexts hides the destination but forces every recipient to constantly scan for new messages. Oblivious Message Retrieval (OMR; CRYPTO~'22) tackles this by using fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) to let an untrusted server perform message retrieval on a recipient's behalf without learning which messages are pertinent. We introduce Oblivious Signaling, which shifts this cost from retrieval to sending. The server maintains a fixed-size encrypted inbox for each recipient. When a sender submits a message, the server applies the same homomorphic update to every inbox: the intended inbox absorbs the message, and the rest remain unchanged at the plaintext level. The update is uniform, can be parallelized across inboxes, and ties the delivery cost strictly to the size of the anonymity set rather than global traffic. Recipients retrieve by fetching and decrypting their inbox, so checking for new messages is independent of the global traffic. We formalize receiver privacy against an untrusted server, even when it colludes with other users, give a concrete construction based on fully homomorphic encryption, and analyze the resulting "digital postage'' trade-off: delivery is expensive, but checking is cheap. Our prototype identifies practical regimes in which this cost-model shift is preferable to scan-based retrieval, even with highly optimized OMR implementations. This cost model is well-suited to settings where recipients check frequently, and messages arrive sporadically, and it naturally discourages high-volume spam.

In this paper, we revisit the design of multi-party distributed point functions (DPFs) and make several new contributions that advance the state of the art. We begin by revisiting security amplification, a fundamental tool underlying many DPF constructions. In particular, the recent landmark work of Goel, Wang, and Wang (CRYPTO'25) critically relies on security amplification and, for a general polynomial number of parties, gives the only known construction based on one-way functions (OWFs) that achieves sublinear dependence on the input domain size. Unfortunately, due to a known gap in the proof of the security amplification theorem of Boyle et al. (CRYPTO'22), we currently still lack a fully established security amplification theorem for DPFs. We fill this gap by providing a new proof of security amplification for DPFs with tight parameters. Equipped with this security amplification theorem as a key technical tool, we develop several new techniques that asymptotically improve the communication cost of multi-party DPFs in both the honest-majority and corrupt-majority settings. Our main results are summarized below, where $N$ denotes the input domain size, $m$ denotes the number of parties, and $t$ denotes the corruption threshold: In the all-but-one-corrupt setting, we describe a new scheme based on OWFs with $\widetilde{O}_\lambda\left(N^{\frac12 + \epsilon} \cdot \sqrt{m}\right)$ share size where $\epsilon > 0$ is an arbitrarily small constant. In comparison, the best previously known OWF-based construction due to Goel et al. incurs $\widetilde{O}_\lambda\left(N^{\frac12 + \epsilon}\cdot m^3\right)$ share size. In the honest-majority setting, assuming $m > (1+\epsilon)D t$ for some integer $D \ge 2$ and arbitrarily small constant $\epsilon > 0$, we construct a new OWF-based scheme with share size $\widetilde{O}_\lambda(N^{\frac{1+\epsilon}{2D}})$, as well as an information-theoretically secure scheme with share size $\widetilde{O}(N^{1/D})$. Both constructions achieve an exponential factor improvement in their dependence on $m$ and $t$ compared to the state-of-the-art schemes of Bunn, Kushilevitz, and Ostrovsky.

Privacy-preserving distributed ledgers enable transaction processing systems in which users can submit transactions without revealing their identities or transaction details. Regulated and institutional settings impose additional requirements: authorized parties must be able to efficiently trace transactions to their originators without compromising overall system privacy. Existing approaches suffer from important limitations, including restricted parallel transaction formation, high computational overhead, and overly broad auditor access to user secrets. We present a framework for efficient tracing that eliminates concurrency issues while limiting auditor access. We formalize our security requirements via an ideal functionality and propose a black-box construction based on pseudorandom functions and anonymous credentials, with two concrete instantiations: one using hash-based PRFs and zk-SNARKs, and another using algebraic PRFs and Sigma protocols. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates practicality, incurring only a few milliseconds of overhead for the added tracing capabilities.

In this paper, we present a general framework for constructing SNARK-friendly post-quantum signature schemes based on minimal assumptions, specifically the security of an arithmetization-oriented family of permutations. The term "SNARK-friendly" here refers to the efficiency of the signature verification process in terms of SNARK constraints, such as R1CS constraints. Within the CAPSS framework, signature schemes are designed as proofs of knowledge of a secret preimage of a one-way function, where the one-way function is derived from the chosen permutation family. To obtain compact signatures with SNARK-friendly verification, we rely on SmallWood, a recently proposed hash-based zero-knowledge argument scheme well suited for statements arising in this context. From this proof system which we tweak towards SNARK-friendliness, the CAPSS framework offers a generic transformation of any arithmetization-oriented permutation family into a SNARK-friendly post-quantum signature scheme. We provide concrete instances built on permutations such as Rescue-Prime, Poseidon, Griffin, and Anemoi. For the Anemoi family, achieving 128-bit security, our approach produces signatures of sizes ranging from 9.5 to 15.5 KB, with R1CS constraints between 24K and 35K. This represents a 4-6x reduction in signature size and a 5-8x reduction in R1CS constraints compared to Loquat (CRYPTO 2024), a SNARK-friendly post-quantum signature scheme based on the Legendre PRF. We showcase CAPSS through aggregated signatures, achieving sub-kilobyte amortized size for large batches, and anonymous credentials, enabling presentation proofs under 150 KB, thus highlighting the practicality of SNARK-friendly, symmetric-based designs for post-quantum primitives.

Functional adaptor signatures (FAS) are a novel cryptographic primitive introduced at CCS'24 that enable privacy-preserving, fine-grained data-payment exchanges between a seller and a buyer in a trustless and atomic manner. In this setup, the seller holds sensitive data \(x\) (e.g., patient records, climate data), and the buyer specifies a function \(f\) (e.g., aggregate, sum). FAS guarantees that the buyer learns \(f(x)\) (and nothing beyond) if and only if the seller receives payment in blockchain-based tokens. Unlike generic smart contracts, FAS-powered solutions excel in privacy, efficiency, and compatibility with diverse blockchain systems. However, prior FAS constructions were limited to linear functions (where $f$ was linear in $x$), restricting their applicability to more complex and prevalent applications including data analytics and ML model evaluations. In this work, we extend the capabilities of FAS to support higher-degree functions \((\textit{deg} \geq 2)\), significantly broadening its range of applications. Our core contribution is a novel FAS design leveraging homomorphic encryption, which simultaneously achieves enhanced efficiency and compatibility for general functions. This approach diverges fundamentally from the restricted design in CCS'24 which relied on connections to functional encryption. We implement our homomorphic encryption-based FAS for functions arising in applications such as data analytics and machine learning inference. Remarkably, even for linear functions, our new design achieves an order-of-magnitude improvement in performance compared to CCS'24 constructions. Furthermore, our solutions seamlessly integrate with prominent blockchain systems, requiring only a basic signature verification script on standard transactions, thus ensuring practical deployability. As a conceptual contribution, we introduce the general paradigm of a blockchain-based functional fair exchange (FFE) protocol, rigorously define buyer and seller fairness, and show that FAS implies the general goal of FFE.

Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are a fundamental building block in cryptography, enabling powerful privacy-preserving and verifiable computations. In the post-quantum era, hash-based ZKPs have emerged as a promising direction due to their conjectured resistance to quantum attacks, along with their simplicity and efficiency. In this work, we introduce SmallWood, a hash-based polynomial commitment scheme (PCS) and zero-knowledge argument system optimized for relatively small instances. Building on the recent degree-enforcing commitment scheme (DECS) from the Threshold-Computation-in-the-Head (TCitH) framework, we refine its formalization and combine it with techniques from Brakedown. This results in a new hash-based PCS that is particularly efficient for polynomials of relatively small degree -typically up to $2^{16}$- outperforming existing approaches in this range. Leveraging this new PCS, we design a hash-based zero-knowledge argument system that outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of proof sizes for witness sizes ranging from $2^6$ to $2^{16}$. Additionally, we present exact zero-knowledge arguments for lattice-based problems using SmallWood, demonstrating highly competitive performance: our scheme yields proof sizes under 25 KB across a wide range of lattice parameters, including Kyber and Dilithium instances.

Generative AI has made high-fidelity deepfakes easy to produce, and online social networks (OSNs) spread them widely across users and platforms. Publicly verifying an image's provenance, i.e., where an image came from and what edits it has undergone, can help combat deepfakes. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) offers an industry standard, but depends on trusted software and hardware. Through digital signatures and zero-knowledge proofs, cryptographic image authentication eliminates the reliance on trusted editors. However, deploying such schemes in OSNs faces three problems: preserving signer privacy, maintaining provenance authenticity across edits, and ensuring efficient verification. To ensure signer anonymity in image provenance, we propose an unlinkable pseudonym certificate scheme (UPCS) based on anonymous credentials, which reduces online signing and verification to ordinary digital signature operations taking only 0.017 and 0.066 ms. Building on UPCS, zk-SNARKs, and hash chains, we propose an anonymous image provenance authentication (AIPA) scheme, ensuring the authenticity of provenance and editing history of an image as it propagates across mutually untrusted editors, while preserving signer privacy. To achieve efficient verification in OSNs, we introduce VIMz-Loua, a GPU-accelerated image proof system with a dedicated JPEG-compression circuit, whose proofs remain a constant 448 B and verify in 6-12 ms across image sizes. We formally prove the security of UPCS and AIPA, and implement an end-to-end workflow in a simulated OSN environment, where the full multi-edit provenance lineage is only 40.2 KB (6.5% of the published image), and is verified in 4.28 s.

Distributed common randomness generation (i.e., the common coin problem) is a cornerstone of randomized distributed computing. While a long line of research has sought scalable solutions, the asynchronous setting remains a challenge. Specifically, while Blum et al. (TCC'21) achieved sub-quadratic communication complexity, their approach lacks ``balance'': certain nodes must still send $\Omega(n)$ messages, creating a scalability bottleneck. Furthermore, their solution only tolerates a $1/3 - \epsilon$ fraction of corrupted nodes, whereas the classic construction by Cachin et al. (PODC'00) tolerates up to $1/2$ under the same setup assumptions. In this work, we close these gaps by presenting the first balanced asynchronous common coin protocol with sub-quadratic communication complexity. In our construction, the communication cost of every honest node is bounded by $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{n})$. Our protocol tolerates an adaptive adversary corrupting up to $(1/2 - \epsilon)n$ nodes. Beyond these asymptotic improvements, our solution avoids the heavy cryptographic machinery (such as fully homomorphic encryption) required by Blum et al. and terminates in just two deterministic rounds, compared to the dozens of expected rounds in prior work. At the heart of our construction are explicit and efficient sampler constructions. These samplers partition a population with an honest majority of at least $(1/2+\epsilon)n$ nodes into $O(\sqrt{n})$ communities, ensuring that a majority of these communities maintain a ``forever-honest'' majority. By leveraging how communities are allocated, we design mechanisms that allow each community to collectively emulate a single ``virtual node'' in Cachin et al.'s protocol. Reducing the number of participants from $n$ physical nodes to $O(\sqrt{n})$ virtual nodes drives the total communication complexity to a sub-quadratic level. Finally, we extend our methodology to Asynchronous Binary Byzantine Agreement (ABA), yielding the first balanced ABA protocol with sub-quadratic communication complexity that tolerates up to $(1/3 - \epsilon)n$ adaptive corruptions.

Non-malleable zero-knowledge argument(NMZK) is a strong notion of zero-knowledge argument that ensures security against man-in-the-middle(MIM) attacks. While three-round constructions exist for various weak zero-knowledge arguments under standard assumptions, all known (weak) NMZK protocols in the plain model have required at least four rounds. In this work, we construct the \emph{first three-round weak non-malleable zero-knowledge argument} under standard cryptographic assumptions. Our protocol satisfies weak zero-knowledge and $\epsilon$-non-malleability, where the latter allows an $\epsilon$ probability gap between the MIM experiment and the stand-alone experiment for any polynomial inverse $\epsilon$. Our construction relies only on well-established primitives, such as the existence of two-message oblivious transfer protocols and delayed-input WI arguments, non-interactive commitments, and circuit-privacy fully homomorphic encryptions.

Shuffling is a fundamental operation in secure multiparty computation (MPC), yet existing maliciously secure protocols for shuffling $m$ elements among $n$ parties require at least $n^2m$ online communication and computation, compared with $O(nm)$ in the semi-honest additive-sharing setting. We formalize and extend the \emph{permute-in-turn paradigm}, which constructs MPC shuffles from permutation protocols, capturing the methodology adopted in most prior works. Our generic transformations achieve semi-honest or malicious security with only $O(C_{\mathrm{BC}}+nm)$ online communication and computation, where $C_{\mathrm{BC}}$ is the cost of one parallel broadcast (allowing unanimous abort). Our transformations are \emph{for free} in two senses: they yield linear online phases without exceeding the overall asymptotic cost of applying $n$ MPC permutations, while \emph{freeing} the online phase of the shuffle protocol from dependence on the MPC permutation protocol. This decoupling allows future work to optimize permutation protocols independently while benefiting all MPC shuffle protocols that follow the paradigm. Instantiated with additive and Shamir secret sharing, our transformations yield the first maliciously secure shuffles with $O(C_{\mathrm{BC}}+nm)$ online cost, improving previous bounds of $O(Bn^2m)$ and $O(n^2m\log m)$, respectively, where $B$ is a cut-and-choose parameter. We formally prove semi-honest and universally composable (UC) security for the corresponding transformations. For $m=2^{12}$ and $n=15$, our prototype achieves over $60\times$ lower online runtime and $120\times$ lower online communication than prior work, with only a $1.3\times$ increase in total runtime.

The widespread use of machine learning on sensitive data makes Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning (PPML) essential for data confidentiality. Current state-of-the-art PPML systems employ hybrid protocol designs to evaluate various operators to achieve better performance; yet, existing hybrid approaches adopt fixed protocol assignments without considering the deployment setting, resulting in inefficiencies across diverse network environments, such as LANs and WANs. To address this, we introduce NetAdapt, a cost-model-driven framework that automatically assigns FHE and MPC protocols to optimize inference efficiency under varying network conditions, by designing a predictive cost model based on the dialect of the Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR)’s Tensor Operator Set Architecture (TOSA), and an ILP-based solver for managing the cross-protocol conversion while dynamically updating FHE costs based on homomorphic multiplication depth. Experimental results demonstrate that NetAdapt delivers $6.68\times$ to $12.92\times$ improvements in inference running time compared to state-of-the-art solutions, allowing network-agnostic PPML.

MACsec Key Agreement (MKA) is the IEEE 802.1X key-management protocol used to establish and maintain Secure Associations for MACsec deployments. Although MKA is widely deployed, machine-checked analyses of its core key-agreement logic remain scarce. This paper presents a formal analysis of a simplified two-party MKA exchange using the Tamarin prover. We model the initial session establishment and a subsequent rekey round, and verify secrecy, authentication, agreement, ordering, and freshness properties. The analysis confirms these guarantees under a Dolev--Yao adversary when the pre-shared Connectivity Association Key (CAK) is not compromised. We also identify a structural weakness: a malicious or compromised Key Server can inject an arbitrary Secure Association Key (SAK) that the Server accepts. This finding clarifies the trust assumptions of MKA and motivates additional verification or binding mechanisms for partially trusted deployments.

Group signatures (GSs; Chaum and van Heyst, EUROCRYPT 1991) are digital signatures that allow a signer to anonymously prove group membership, while still enabling a special authority, called the opener, to identify the signer when necessary. Group Signatures with Message-Dependent Opening (GS-MDO; Sakai et al., Pairing 2012) weaken the power of the opener by introducing another authority, the admitter, who issues a message-dependent token. In previous GS-MDO schemes, these tokens can be viewed as signatures. Therefore they can be publicly verified using the verification algorithm of the underlying signature scheme. However, no explicit notion of public verifiability for tokens, meaning the ability to publicly verify whether a token can be used for opening a group signature, has been defined so far. Clarifying this implicit security property is important for understanding the feasibility of GS-MDO. In this paper, we formally define public verifiability of tokens. We establish a proper relationship between verifying a token as a signature and verifying that the token can be used for opening, which typically requires the opener's secret key. We also show that the Ohara et al. pairing-based GS-MDO scheme (AsiaCCS 2013), the Libert et al. lattice-based GS-MDO scheme (ACNS 2016), and the Libert et al. pairing-based GS-MDO scheme (CT-RSA 2014) satisfy our definition, suggesting that our formalization is reasonable. Finally, we discuss how publicly verifiable tokens can be used to provide accountability for the admitter, enabling them to demonstrate that tokens have been honestly generated according to the token-generation algorithm.

One of the main hallmarks of proof-of-work (PoW) consensus protocols is their ability to adjust the difficulty of the PoW, so that it accurately reflects the level of participation and hence maintains security in a setting where protocol participation is unknown and may over time change dramatically. Importantly, this enables the protocol to retain its fundamental characteristics (such as the regularity of dispensing new tokens) irrespectively of the number of parties running the protocol (also known as ``miners'') at any given time. The speed with which difficulty can be adjusted is a fundamental feature of a blockchain protocol: The faster the rate with which the difficulty is adjusted, the more agile the protocol is in the face of fluctuating participation. In this work, we put forward, for the first time, a blockchain protocol that performs difficulty adjustment in constant time; prior provably secure designs only offered protocols with, at best, poly-logarithmic overhead for difficulty adjustment. Our construction is based on the parallel-chain approach and a new target recalculation function that adjusts mining difficulty making use of information from all chains in the past epoch via a novel application of approximate-agreement techniques that may be of independent interest.

Homomorphic Encryption (HE) enables computations on encrypted data without decryption, but it does not guarantee the integrity or correctness of the performed operations. To address this limitation, verifiable HE (vHE) has been proposed. However, achieving efficient vHE for RNS-based HE schemes (e.g., BFV/BGV/CKKS) remains challenging: While the Residue Number System (RNS) boosts performance of HE via multi-modulus ciphertext representations, it significantly complicates the cross-field consistency checks in vHE. We observe that existing vHEs for RNS-based HE suffer from at least one of the following limitations: they do not readily extend to the zero-knowledge setting (Atapoor et al., CiC 2024), incur linear proof size & verifier cost (Zhou et al., S&P 2025), or are designed for a modified HE scheme (Cascudo et al., Crypto 2025). We present $\mathsf{PRISM}$, the first practical zkSNARK for standard RNS-based HEs. Our techniques are threefold: (1) a new cryptographic primitive called Multiple-Field Polynomial Commitment Scheme (MF-PCS) that efficiently prove the cross-field modulo relations, which is the key bottleneck in RNS-based HE verification; (2) a novel Polynomial Interactive Oracle Proof (PIOP) for (inverse) number theoretic transforms with $O(N)$ prover time and $O(\log N)$ verifier time in a model with an offline phase; (3) upgrading MF-PCS and PIOPs to achieve zero-knowledge with small overhead via Vector Oblivious Linear Evaluation (VOLE) correlations. We fully implemented $\mathsf{PRISM}$ and evaluated it against state-of-the-art schemes. Compared to Zhou et al. which has the fastest prover time, $\mathsf{PRISM}$ has $3.5\times$ slower prover time, but up to $7.8\times$ faster verifier time and $7.8\times$ smaller proof size. Compared to Atapoor et al. which has the smallest proof size, $\mathsf{PRISM}$ has $5.5\times$ larger proof size, but roughly $10.1\times$ faster prover time and $2.6\times$ faster verifier time.

The Fiat--Shamir (FS) transformation is a technique that converts interactive protocols into non-interactive ones. FS is secure in idealized models such as the random oracle model (ROM) (if the interactive protocol satisfies a condition known as state-restoration soundness). It is known that there are protocols whose FS transformation is secure in the ROM, yet insecure when instantiated with any concrete hash function. Historically, these protocols were contrived (as in, they were designed so their FS transformation would be unsound). Khovratovich, Rothblum and Soukhanov (CRYPTO 2025) showed that a class of natural (and practically deployed) protocols based on a protocol of Goldwasser, Kalai and Rothblum (JACM 2015) was also unsound when compiled with FS and any concrete hash function. We extend the attack to a different class of protocols: those whose instances are generated by running a program. This setting covers concrete trends in modern proof systems, in which the computation to be proven is described by a program (often adversarialy generated) which is then either compiled or autonomously converted into an instance of target relation such as rank-1 constraint satisfaction (R1CS). We show that, when the conversion process is "expressive enough", an adversary controlling the program code can break soundness of the non-interactive proof system. The attacks generalize to a wide class of protocols: any protocol in which a cheating prover can prepare an accepting transcript before the statement is bound. We show that variants of the Spartan (CRYPTO 2020) and Aurora (EUROCRYPT 2019) proof systems for R1CS fall in this class. Complementing the attacks, we formalize a mitigation: deriving the first Fiat--Shamir challenge from the generated statement, rather than from the program that generates it, provably reduces the soundness of the compiled protocol to that of the underlying protocol for the non-generated relation.

Secure multiparty computation (MPC) enables distrusting parties in a distributed system to compute on their private inputs without compromising their privacy. For many secret-sharing-based approaches, including some of today's most efficient MPC protocols, there is a pattern where two shared values are locally multiplied into some intermediate representation that is immediately and interactively translated back into sharings of the product. The intermediate representation is often still a full-fledged but different secret sharing scheme. This has been used to efficiently compute dot products by computing the sum of all intermediate products and then interactively translating only the sum instead of translating each individual product. Beyond that, the intermediate representation or secret sharing scheme has mostly been seen only as a necessary interim step, leaving most of its potential untapped. We change that by proposing the paradigm of leveled linear secret sharing, which allows dynamic switching between the original secret sharing and the previously only intermediate one more freely, while enabling arbitrary linear computations in any of the domains. Prior multiplications are split into a non-interactive multiplication that switches from one to the other secret sharing, and an interactive upgrade back to the original secret sharing domain. The upgrade now does not necessarily follow each multiplication immediately, but just needs to be placed somewhere before the next multiplication is computed, possibly upgrading the linear aggregation of many multiplications' results. We apply this idea to improve three-party computation on replicated sharings (CCS'16), n-party BGW-style protocols (STOC'88), and masked secret sharing protocols such as ABY2.0 (USENIX Security'21). We build a novel optimizer that optimally selects which gate of a circuit is evaluated in which domain. With that, we improve communication by 10-37% for many circuits. Furthermore, we implement our generalization for replicated sharing, measure run time improvements of mostly 10-26% in a LAN, and make a full implementation of the protocol and our novel optimizer publicly available.

Towards bridging the gap between passively and actively secure multiparty computation (MPC), the use of sublinear distributed zero-knowledge (DZK) proofs gained popularity. Such proofs enable extending a passively secure protocol by adding a verification step whose communication is sublinear in the circuit size. For arbitrarily many parties and a dishonest majority, adding a trusted dealer enables efficient computation, as recently shown by Asterisk (IEEE S&P'24) without requiring DZK. This setting is also compatible with DZK, as shown by Boyle et al. (CRYPTO'21). Unfortunately, their approach is not tailored to computation over a ring $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$, often favored for concrete efficiency and practicality, resulting in high computational overhead. In the honest majority setting with few parties, Li et al. (CCS'24) optimized DZK to rings, achieving significant performance improvements. In this work, we propose the first sublinear verification protocol that is both, designed for the $n$-party dishonest majority setting with a dealer, and tailored to computation over a ring $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$, combining and improving upon both approaches above. Previous approaches used $n$ DZK proofs to check correct behavior for each individual party. Instead, we show how to verify in a single, novel DZK proof that all parties together behave correctly. This decreases the communication complexity for verification from $\mathcal{O}(n \cdot \log m)$ to $\mathcal{O}(n + \log m)$ ring elements per party for $m$ multiplications. Hence, for the first time, active security using DZK scales well with the number of parties $n$. We provide the first public implementation for DZK with arbitrary $n$ and a dealer and show its practical efficiency. For $m=10^6$ multiplications across 30 layers, communication increases by only 0.7% over the passively secure base protocol with only moderate computation overhead. This becomes especially useful in a WAN setting, where we achieve active security at only 34% run time overhead over the passive variant. Compared to Asterisk (IEEE S&P'24), our protocol has 1.8x better communication and improves run time by 2.5x in WAN and 11.9x in LAN.

Open-source large language models (LLMs) are increasingly competitive with closed-source models while offering transparency and the ability to run inference without exposing user inputs to a service provider. However, running large-scale models locally requires substantial computational resources. In practice, users may still resort to a third-party provider, giving rise to privacy and correctness concerns. Existing solutions that address these problems often impose substantial server overhead or introduce additional trust assumptions. In this paper, we present Maverick, a novel approach to private and verifiable LLM inference based on a protocol for delegating matrix-vector multiplication, a dominant operation in LLMs. At its core, Maverick provides, to our knowledge, the first information-theoretically sound verification protocol for matrix-vector multiplication delegation with transparent preprocessing, efficient (batch) verification, and virtually no server overhead. We combine this verification primitive with LPN-based pseudorandom masking to provide input privacy. We implement our matrix-vector delegation primitive and use it to build an end-to-end prototype of Maverick, which we evaluate on Qwen3-4B by measuring throughput in tokens per second. We evaluate client configurations with 1-8 threads. With one client thread and a CPU server using up to 128 threads, Maverick achieves throughput gains over local inference of up to 17x when privacy masks are generated online, 45x when they are precomputed, and 44x when only verification is required. With four client threads, the corresponding gains are 13x, 18x, and 17x. When server computation is no longer the bottleneck, client-side microbenchmarks with simulated network delay show speedups of 12x-20x, 34x-135x, and 38x-157x.

Structure-preserving (SP) cryptography enables the modular composition of pairing-based primitives through the definition of cryptographic algorithms whose public inputs and outputs are group elements and whose computations are generic group operations or pairings. Despite their potential usefulness, obtaining compressing primitives such as accumulators and vector commitments in the SP setting has remained a long-standing challenge, partly due to known impossibility results [Abe et al. Eurocrypt 2012]. Recently, [Krenn, Mir, and Slamanig PKC 2026] proposed the first SP vector commitments (SPVC) and accumulators (SPA) that circumvent these barriers via the adoption of structured message spaces that, albeit restricted, enable interesting applications such as constant-size pairing-based ring signatures. In this work, we revisit the security of these recent constructions with a twofold contribution. First, we identify attacks against the recently proposed SPVC, SPA, and ring signature schemes. Second, we present new constructions of SPVCs and SPAs that preserve the efficiency and structure-preserving nature of the original designs while achieving the desired standard security notions of position-binding and collision-resistance respectively. Specifically, we construct a new SPVC with constant-size proofs and verification under the power discrete logarithm assumption in the algebraic group model. Building upon it, we introduce a new notion of SPA with extended message spaces and give a construction achieving collision resistance and constant-size membership proofs under the same assumption. Finally, we apply our techniques to obtain constant-size ring signatures in bilinear groups.

We present RoKoko, a new lattice-based succinct argument system that achieves a linear-time prover alongside polylogarithmic communication and verifier complexity. Asymptotically, our construction improves upon RoK and Roll (ASIACRYPT 2025), the first post-quantum SNARK with $\tilde{O}(\lambda)$ proof size, by a multiplicative factor of $\Theta(\log \lambda)$. Practically, our system yields proofs of roughly $200$KB, while outperforming the state-of-the-art polynomial commitment scheme Greyhound (CRYPTO 2024) with a $100\times$ faster verification time, similar prover time, and competitive proof size. Our framework natively supports (tensor-)structured relations, such as polynomial evaluation and sumcheck relations. At a high level, our construction follows the recursive split-and-fold paradigm: the prover first splits the witness into $\rho$ sub-witnesses, sends the corresponding cross-terms, and then folds them into a single witness that is shorter by a factor of $\rho$ using verifier challenges. Prior works typically restrict $\rho = O(1)$ to preserve succinct verification and maintain the optimal $\tilde{O}(\lambda)$ proof size. We overcome this “constant barrier”, which enables larger $\rho$ and thereby reduces the proof size. To achieve this, we introduce the following technical contributions. (i) Committed folding. Instead of sending $O(\rho)$ cross-terms in the clear, the prover commits to the messages and later proves that the committed vector satisfies the verification relations. This enables the use of a larger shrinking factor, thereby reducing the number of recursion rounds. While this strategy has been successfully used in LaBRADOR (CRYPTO 2023), additional care is required here to preserve succinct verification. (ii) Recursive commitments. We generalise the double-commitment technique from LaBRADOR into a framework for recursive commitments, yielding further compression in commitment size. This results in concrete improvements in communication within each recursion round. (iii) Sumcheck-driven structured recursion. We extend the sumcheck framework from SALSAA (ePrint 2025/2124) to prove substantially more complex constraints arising in our construction (and open for future extensions), including correctness of random projections, inner-product claims and well-formedness of recursive commitments. While expressing these constraints as sumcheck relations requires considerable technical effort, the resulting protocols compose seamlessly with the structured recursion, yielding both linear-time proving and succinct verification.

In this work, we present the first practical verifiable weighted secret sharing (VWSS) scheme based on the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT). Classical secret sharing schemes, such as Shamir’s, assume participants with equal weights, which is inadequate for emerging applications like stake-based DAO voting and proof-of-stake blockchains, where parties naturally have unequal voting power or stakes. While prior work (e.g., Garg et al., Crypto'23) demonstrated that CRT-based (ramp) secret sharing can support weighted access structures more efficiently than linear secret sharing schemes, existing constructions only guarantee security against honest-but-curious dealers. In contrast to traditional linear secret sharing schemes, extending verifiability to CRT-based weighted secret sharing remains challenging, as current approaches either fail to support weighted access structures or incur prohibitive computational overhead on the dealer, limiting their practicality. To address this gap, we develop novel $\Sigma$-protocols for the \emph{unbounded} proof-of-mod (UPoM) relation using integer commitments in groups of unknown order, which may be of independent interest. Combining our UPoM protocols and new observations on the structural properties of CRT-based secret sharing, we construct a VWSS scheme in which the dealer broadcasts only $O(|A|)$ commitments to secret shares, where $A$ is a subset of parties whose total weight meets the reconstruction threshold $T$. This improves upon the closest prior CRT-based VWSS scheme (Shehata et al., CVC'25), which requires the dealer to broadcast commitments to the secret shares of all parties. Concretely, for a system with four participants and total weight $524$, our scheme generates VWSS proofs in around $0.2$ seconds, \emph{orders of magnitude faster} than the construction of CVC'25, highlighting its practicality for real-world applications.

In this work, we study the communication complexity of information-theoretic MPC with guaranteed output delivery (GOD) in the honest majority setting $(t<n/2)$. The recent work by Song and Ye (EUROCRYPT 2025) gives an honest majority MPC in the random oblivious linear evaluation (OLE) preprocessing model that computes an arithmetic circuit of size $|C|$ with malicious security with abort at the cost of $O(|C|)$ of both communication in field elements and total number of random OLE correlations. We explore the possibility of deriving a similar result for the stronger security notion of GOD. Specifically, we ask the question: `` Is it possible to construct an information-theoretic honest majority MPC in the random OLE preprocessing model that computes an arithmetic circuit of size $|C|$ and achieves GOD with $O(|C|)$ field elements of communication and $O(|C|)$ amount of random OLE correlations in total? '' We resolve the above question in the affirmative by providing a concrete construction. To achieve our result, we mainly rely on two techniques. First, we propose a new secret sharing scheme which we refer to as detectable secret sharing. It is a packed secret sharing scheme with an authentication mechanism. Second, to efficiently verify the computation and locate an error when faults occur, we extensively make use of the virtual transcript technique introduced in the work by Goyal, Song, and Zhu (CRYPTO 2020). Our construction is in the random OLE preprocessing model where we assume random OLEs between each pair of parties. By instantiating the random OLEs from various assumptions, we obtain three honest majority MPC protocols with GOD with the following security and communication: (1) the first one achieves information-theoretic security with offline communication of $O(|C|n)$ elements and online communication of $O(|C|)$ elements, (2) the second one achieves computational security with $\tilde{O}(|C|)$ elements of communication only from a random oracle, and (3) the third one achieves computational security with $O(|C|)$ elements of communication from pseudorandom correlation generators (PCG).

In evolving secret sharing, introduced by Komargodski et al., an infinite set of parties share a secret according to an infinite access structure (where minimal qualified sets are finite). In such schemes, par- ties arrive one by one, and and are given a share by the dealer. There is no additional communication incurred to a given party until the time of reconstruction, where share holders who show up combine their shares to reconstruct the secret if they form a qualified set. In this work, we revisit the notion of quantum evolving secret sharing schemes, we dub QESS, where a quantum secret is shared. Smoothly generalizing the above setting runs into difficulties due to the no-cloning theorem. In particular, values handed to previously arriving parties can not be copied by the dealer and used in the evaluation of future parties’ shares, as often done in evolving secret sharing schemes from the liter- ature. Indeed, attempts to formalize quantum evolving secret sharing, such as that on Chaudhury for the so called dynamic threshold setting and by Cohen et al. for general evolving access structures fell short from adhering to the minimally interactive communication pattern above. In this paper, we take a different approach, and consider a setting where several (possibly infinitely many) copies of a secret (known to the dealer) are generated by need. This approach has been used by Cakan et al. for (finite) quantum secret sharing (QSSS), allowing to circumvent the im- possibility of devising QSSS for monotone access structures which are not no-cloning - those that have disjoint pair of qualified sets. This setting is plausible in many applications, where the secret is known to the dealer at sharing time. Cakan et al. demonstrate that at most n copies of the secret prepared by the dealer, suffice to implement any monotone access structure. In the evolving setting, it is not clear how to devise QESS even for evolving no-cloning access structures. Introducing multiple copies of the secret allows to define QESS with a communication pattern similar to the classical setting, in which arbitrary (not necessarily no cloning) evolving access structures can be implemented. using c(t) ≤ t copies of the secret used to generate the shares of the first t parties - similarly to the finite setting. We study the copy number landscape for various evolving access struc- tures. For general access structures, c(t) ≤ t copies of the secret suffice to generate the shares of the first t parties - similarly to the finite setting. On the lower bound side, the no-cloning theorem implies c(t) = t is nec- essary for QESS. The main question we leave open is whether a single copy suffices for no-cloning evolving access structures, while 1 is the ex- act number of the finite setting. We prove that every no-cloning evolving access structure has a QESS with a finite copy number c(t) ≤ C, where the constant C depends on the particular access structure. Furthermore, for every T0, there exists a QESS as above with c(t) ≤ 1 for t ≤ T0. Our techniques generalize the hybrid technique of Cakan et al. abstract- ing their implicit approach of treating the access structure as a union of no-cloning access structures, and implementing each via exiting quantum erasure codes (QECC), which provide not privacy. Then, a copy of the secret, masked by a classical random key (via QOTP) is encoded by each of these codes. The classical keys are then classically shared via each of the access structure to provide privacy. While they rely on a union of no-cloning threshold access structures, we use arbitrary ones. This often reduces the resulting copy number already in the finite setting. Special care is required to share the QOTP keys for each access structure in the union, while keeping every party’s share finite.

We study non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs (NIZKs) for NP satisfying: 1) statistical soundness, 2) computational zero-knowledge (ZK) and 3) certified-everlasting zero-knowledge (CE-ZK). The CE-ZK property allows a verifier of a quantum proof to revoke the proof in a way that can be checked (certified) by the prover. Conditioned on successful certification, the verifier's state can be efficiently simulated with only the statement, in a statistically indistinguishable way. Our contributions regarding these certified-everlasting NIZKs (CE-NIZKs) are as follows: - We identify a barrier to obtaining CE-NIZKs in the CRS model via generalizations of known interactive ZK proofs that satisfy CE-ZK. - We circumvent this by constructing CE-NIZK using non-black-box use of NIZK for NP satisfying certain properties, along with OWFs. As a result, we obtain CE-NIZKs for NP in the CRS model, based on polynomial hardness of the learning with errors (LWE) assumption. - In addition, we observe that the aforementioned barrier does not apply to the shared EPR model. We leverage this to construct CE-NIZK for NP in this model based on any statistical binding hidden bits generator, which is known from LWE. The only quantum computation here involves single-qubit measurements of the EPR pairs.

In conventional $(k,n)$ secret sharing schemes, a dealer distributes shares of a secret among $n$ participants such that any subset of at least $k$ participants can reconstruct the secret. While such schemes often fail to accommodate practical scenarios in which participants have different management permissions over the secret. To address this problem, weighted $(t,n)$ secret sharing was introduced. In this case, each participant is assigned a specific weight, and the dealer distributes a share to each participant according to their weight, so that any subset of participants whose sum of weights is at least $t$ can recover the secret. However, in weighted $(t,n)$ secret sharing schemes, the number of participants $n$ is known in advance. When $n$ is uncertain and even grows over time, traditional weighted $(t,n)$ secret sharing schemes remain inadequate in such dynamic environments. To solve the problem, we propose the concept of a weighted evolving $t$-threshold secret sharing. Based on the prefix codes, we first propose a construction of a weighted evolving $3$-threshold scheme over the polynomial quotient ring for an $\ell$-bit secret. And then we extend the framework to a general weighted evolving $t$-threshold scheme for any $t\geq 3$. Moreover, we prove the correctness and security of the proposed scheme by leveraging the properties of the polynomial quotient ring and prefix codes. Finally, we analyze the corresponding share size. The result shows that for the $m$-th participant with the weight $w_m$ satisfying $1\leq w_m\leq t-1$, the size of the corresponding share is $w_m(t-1-\frac{w_m-1}{2})(\ell_m-1)+w_m\ell$ bits, where $\ell_m$ denotes the length of a binary prefix code of encoding integer $m$. In contrast, a baseline scheme that allocates $w_m$ independent full evolving shares to this participant would require $w_m(t-1)(\ell_m-1)+w_m\ell$ bits. Our proposed scheme saves $\frac{(w_m-1)w_m}{2}(\ell_m-1)$ bits, thereby achieving a smaller share size.

Additive randomized encodings (AREs) reduce the computation of an m-party function f(x1, . . . , xm) to independently encoding each input and adding the resulting encodings in an Abelian group, so that their sum reveals nothing but the output. Robust AREs (RAREs) additionally protect against collusions between the evaluator and some of the parties, guaranteeing that even if some of the input encodings are completely controlled by the adversary, the partial sum of the remaining (honest) input encodings leaks no more than the residual function f(x_H, ·) obtained by fixing the honest inputs x_H. Much of the appeal of RAREs come from the fact that they imply robust non-interactive secure computation in the shuffle model, where parties send messages to the evaluator through anonymous communication channels. Existing constructions of general-purpose RARE either assume ideal obfuscation or rely on structured public parameters generated using secret randomness that must remain hidden. We construct general-purpose RARE with transparent setup. Assuming indistinguishability obfuscation (which is necessary) and LWE, both with subexponential security, we show that every efficient function admits an efficient RARE in the common random string model. We also show how to eliminate public parameters altogether in the honest-majority setting. The main technical observation behind our construction is that non-robust ARE, which exist assuming only one-way functions, can be leveraged to protect from spoofing of honest party encodings.

We present ReinsPIRe, a new single-server PIR with higher throughput (smaller computation costs) than all previous schemes that avoid offline communication. The crux of ReinsPIRe is new techniques for leveraging preprocessing in the common reference string (CRS) model to bring down the compute cost significantly. We show that the majority of the server's FHE operations may completely avoid NTT polynomial encodings while maintaining the ability to efficiently multiply polynomials using matrix operations. As a result, most computation may be performed with moduli that are natively supported by modern hardware substantially improving throughput. Furthermore, our techniques result in more compact cryptographic materials reducing memory bandwidth bottlenecks. To obtain ReinsPIRe, we apply our new techniques to the prior InsPIRe construction [Mahdavi et al., S&P 2026] to obtain a higher throughput single-server PIR while maintaining the same low communication costs. ReinsPIRe obtains 5.9 GB/s throughput per server core that is a 2x improvement. We apply ReinsPIRe to improve two different applications. First, we consider the in-storage PIR setting where large databases are stored in external memory (such as SSD) that introduces additional storage I/O costs. In this model, ReinsPIRe obtains 3.3x better throughput than prior works due to its smaller cryptographic material. Secondly, we present a verifiable PIR scheme vReinsPIRe building upon our formulation of server computation as matrix operations. vReinsPIRe provides the smallest online communication cost while using nearly 50x smaller long-term client storage compared to prior works with low online communication.

Multi-party computation (MPC) enables a set of mutually $n$ distrusting parties to compute any function on their private inputs. Mainly, MPC facilitates agreement on the function’s output while preserving the secrecy of honest inputs, even against a subset of $t$ parties controlled by an adversary. With applications spanning from anonymous broadcast to private auctions, MPC is considered a cornerstone of distributed cryptography, and significant research efforts have been aimed at making MPC practical in the last decade. However, most libraries either make strong assumptions like the network being bounded synchronous, or incur high computation overhead from the extensive use of expensive public-key operations that prevent them from scaling beyond a few dozen parties. This work presents Velox, an asynchronous MPC protocol that offers fairness against an optimal adversary corrupting up to $t<\frac{n}{3}$ parties. Velox significantly enhances practicality by leveraging lightweight cryptographic primitives - such as symmetric-key encryption and hash functions - which are 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than public-key operations, resulting in substantial computational efficiency. Moreover, Velox is highly communication-efficient, with linear amortized communication relative to circuit size and only $\mathcal{O}(n^3)$ field elements of additive overhead. Concretely, Velox requires just $9.33$ field elements per party per multiplication gate, more than $10\times$ reduction compared to the state of the art. Moreover, Velox also offers Post-Quantum Security as lightweight cryptographic primitives retain their security against a quantum adversary. We implement Velox comprehensively, covering both offline and online phases, and evaluate its performance on a geographically distributed testbed through a real-world application: anonymous broadcast. Our implementation securely shuffles a batch of $k=256$ messages in $4$ seconds with $n=16$ parties and $18$ seconds with $n=64$ parties, a $36\times$ and $28.6\times$ reduction in latency compared to the prior best work. At scale with $n=112$ parties, Velox is able to shuffle the same batch of messages in under $50$ seconds from end to end, illustrating its effectiveness and scalability. Overall, our work removes significant barriers faced by prior asynchronous MPC solutions, making asynchronous MPC practical and efficient for large-scale deployments involving $100$s of parties.

We explore the setting of asynchronous multi-party computation (AMPC) with optimal resilience $n=3t+1$, and develop an efficient protocol that optimizes both communication and computation. The recent work by Goyal, Liu-Zhang, and Song [Crypto' 24] was the first to achieve AMPC with amortized linear communication cost without using computationally heavy public-key cryptography. However, its $\mathcal{O}(n^{14})$ additive communication overhead renders it impractical for most real-world applications. It is possible to reduce the communication overhead significantly by leveraging cryptographic tools such as %random oracle hash, homomorphic commitments, public-key cryptography, or zero-knowledge proofs; however, the corresponding AMPC protocols introduce computation overhead of $\Omega(nC)$ public-key cryptographic operations that become bottleneck as $n$ grows. Overall, achieving AMPC with linear communication complexity, low additive communication overhead, and low computation overhead remains an open challenge. In this work, we resolve this efficiency challenge by utilizing the random oracle model. By relying solely on computationally efficient primitives such as random oracle hash and symmetric-key cryptography, our protocol is not only efficient in terms of computation and communication overhead but also post-quantum secure. For a circuit with $C$ multiplication gates, our protocol achieves $\mathcal{O}(Cn)$ communication per multiplication gate with an additive overhead of $\mathcal{O}(n^4)$ communication. In terms of computation, our protocol only introduces an additive overhead of $\mathcal{O}(n^5)$ hash computations independent of the circuit size.

We study the communication complexity of SPDZ-type MPC protocols in the dishonest majority setting with maximum corruption, where $t=n-1$ out of $n$ parties can be corrupted. In the semi-honest setting, the state-of-the-art SPDZ protocol achieves an amortized communication cost of $4n$ field elements per multiplication gate, assuming a pseudorandom correlation generator (PCG) that prepares random Beaver triples silently in the offline phase. However, achieving security against malicious adversaries typically incurs a substantial overhead. Existing works either blow up the communication by incurring $10n$ field elements per gate or an additional overhead of $O(\sqrt{|C|}\cdot n^3)$, or additionally require an additively homomorphic encryption scheme. In this work, we construct a maliciously secure SPDZ-type protocol with the same amortized communication complexity as the semi-honest variant, i.e., $4n$ field elements per multiplication gate, assuming a PCG for \emph{tensor-product} correlations. We note that the tensor-product correlations come free in communication as by-products from almost all existing constructions of PCGs for random Beaver triples, although additional local computation is required. These by-products allow us to construct an efficient preprocessing phase and a recursive check protocol, which enables an online evaluation of the circuit without authenticating all the wire values. The recursive check requires sublinear communication in $|C|$, though it incurs an $O(k)$ overhead on the online computational cost compared to the semi-honest baseline.

Continuous monitoring in the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) creates an attribution problem: an abnormal sample may rep- resent a genuine physiological event, an accidental sensor fault, or a deliberate cyberattack. Conventional anomaly detectors estimate whether data are unusual, but cannot establish who produced a sample, which software processed it, or whether it was replayed. This paper proposes Verifiable Medical Sensor Provenance (VMSP), a lightweight chain of authenticated records spanning sensing, gateway processing, and clinical ingestion. We implemented Ascon-AEAD128 and Ascon-Hash256 record pro- tection, converted verification outcomes into machine-learning features, and evaluated 12,000 generated windows. Macro-F1 increased from 0.644 for signal-only classification and 0.807 with device health to 0.976 with Ascon-derived provenance; attack recall increased from 0.398 to 1.000. For a 64-byte payload, the prototype added 68 bytes and measured median encryption and verification times of 0.282 and 0.297 ms on an x86-64 host. These measurements establish a reproducible software proof of concept, not clinical or embedded-device performance.

Succinct Non-Interactive Half-Chosen VOLE allows a sender with a vector $\boldsymbol x$ of length $n$ and a receiver with a scalar $y$ to establish a pair of additive shares of $\boldsymbol x \cdot y$, by simultaneous exchange of succinct messages. Recent works construct NIHC-VOLE with $O(n^{2/3} \lambda)$ communication from various assumptions (Abram, Roy and Scholl, Eurocrypt 24) and poly-logarithmic communication from LWE (Abram, Malavolta and Roy, STOC 25). We explore how bilinear pairings can improve group-based NIHC-VOLE schemes. • In the public setup setting, our scheme has online communication of $O(\sqrt{n \log n})$ group elements. The scheme relies on a new BDDH-like assumption. • In the designated receiver setting, our scheme has online communication of only 3 group elements and reusable offline communication of $O(n)$ group elements. The scheme relies on the bilinear power DDH assumption.

Privacy-preserving Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solvers allow multiple distrustful parties to solve the conjunction of their private formulas without revealing their inputs. Prior work on privacy-preserving SAT solvers, i.e., ppSAT (USENIX Security 2022), fails to solve formulas of practical size and complexity because it supports only the most basic SAT-solving algorithm. We bring privacy-preserving SAT solving closer to practicality by introducing ppCDCL. Through carefully orchestrated oblivious data structures and solver architecture, our new solver enables conflict-driven clause learning (CDCL) and efficient propagation, the two most important features of modern plaintext SAT solvers. Evaluation results show that ppCDCL outperforms ppSAT in both capability and efficiency. It solves significantly more instances: 98% vs. 65% on the Haplotype benchmarks and 84% vs. 28% on the larger, more diverse SATLIB benchmarks. Furthermore, it solves 36% of SATLIB instances within 1,000 seconds compared to only 4% for ppSAT.

Ratchets are critical cryptographic protocols deployed in many secure messaging applications such as Signal Messenger, WhatsApp, and Apple's iMessage PQ3, which aim for strong guarantees such as Post-Compromise Security (PCS). Computer-aided cryptography can be used to increase confidence in security protocols but, until now, has been unable to prove PCS in the computational model for a ratchet due to the complexity of the cryptographic arguments involved. Existing mechanized PCS analyses have been limited to the symbolic model. We tackle this problem with Squirrel, which is well-suited to study such stateful protocols. The task is still a challenge, due to the intricate reasoning required, and because Sqirrel's indirect modeling of secrecy has difficulties in scaling to such a complex proof. To address these issues, we develop a novel logical framework in Squirrel that allows to reason on secrecy as a first-class notion, and we validate our approach by verifying the PCS of an asymmetric ratchet. This provides the first mechanized computational proof of PCS to date for a ratchet, and possibly for any protocol.

Multi-party matrix invertibility testing over finite fields of small order or characteristic is a pivotal operation for thresholdizing multivariate quadratic~(MQ) signature schemes. However, achieving perfect privacy in a constant number of rounds remains a challenge: existing solutions either suffer from information leakage, failing to provide perfect privacy, or require high computational and communication overhead, in particular, when $p\leq n$, where $p$ and $n$ denote the characteristic of the underlying field and the matrix size, respectively. To address this limitation, we propose two protocols for multi-party testing of matrix invertibility. The first protocol extends the Cramer-Damg{\aa}rd protocol to fields of small order by employing the field lifting technique. The second protocol is based on multi-party computation of the Samuelson-Berkowitz algorithm, specifically designed for fields of small characteristic. Both protocols are formalized in the arithmetic black-box~(ABB) model with Shamir's secret sharing scheme. We show that both protocols achieve perfect privacy while allowing for a tradeoff between input-independent offline rounds and input-dependent online rounds, where the input corresponds to the shared matrices. Specifically, the first protocol runs in $7$ offline rounds with communication complexity $O(Nn^4)$ and in $3$ online rounds with communication complexity $O(n^4)$, and the second protocol runs in $3$ offline rounds with communication complexity $O(n^4)$ and in $9$ online rounds with communication complexity $O(n^4)$, where $n$ is the matrix size and $N$ is the number of parties.

Threshold signatures enable a set of $n$ parties to jointly generate signatures under a single public key such that any subset of at least $t+1$ parties can produce a valid signature, whereas any coalition of at most $t$ parties cannot. They constitute a fundamental primitive for distributed trust and are widely deployed in systems such as certification authorities, blockchains, and multiparty wallets. Modern applications require strong security guarantees under realistic adversarial models, including resistance to adaptive corruptions, tight security reductions, and low interaction complexity—most notably, a minimal number of communication rounds. Recent progress has produced threshold signature schemes in pairing-free groups that achieve tight and adaptive security with three rounds of interaction. This leaves open the central question of whether one can simultaneously achieve tight security, adaptive security, and two-round signing under a standard, non-interactive hardness assumption. In this work, we resolve this question by presenting TZAR, the first two-round threshold signature scheme that is tightly and adaptively secure under the standard decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) assumption in pairing-free cyclic groups. Our construction achieves full adaptive security against up to $t < n$ corruptions and admits a tight security reduction with only constant-factor loss. Consequently, TZAR provides strong provable security guarantees and minimizes interaction by requiring only two signing rounds, an important advantage for latency-sensitive distributed environments.

Compressing correlated randomness is a key component of secure computation protocols in the silent preprocessing model and has received significant attention in recent years. Most existing constructions target additive correlations, where the parties receive additive shares of a relation. Beyond additive correlations, much less is known: more general linear correlations can be compressed using pseudorandom secret sharing, generic constructions for richer linear-output correlations can be obtained by combining LWE-based multiparty HSS with share conversion, in regimes where the share-conversion overhead is efficient, and general correlations can be compressed using indistinguishability obfuscation. In this work, we advance the study of compression for useful forms of correlated randomness beyond additive output sharing (concretely, linear-output correlations, together with a constrained variant capturing random permutations), without resorting to $iO$, introducing new techniques, new feasibility results, and relying on more diverse assumptions. We provide several constructions for pseudorandom correlation generators and functions using direct HSS- and LPN/MQ-based techniques. Concretely, we focus on two types of correlations in this work. First, we introduce pseudorandom permutation functions, where each party obtains a portion of a pseudorandom permutation $\pi$ over the set $\set{1,\dots, n}$, such that a single party learns nothing about the full permutation beyond its own output. We give a three-party construction of a pseudorandom correlation function (PCF) for permutations from homomorphic secret sharing satisfying a special share programmability property. This construction can be instantiated from a variety of standard assumptions and can even be concretely efficient (generating pseudorandom permutations in a fraction of a second). We describe two applications of pseudorandom permutation functions: one in anonymous broadcast and the other in single secret leader election. Second, we introduce pseudorandom correlation generators for classical correlations (such as Beaver triples) where additive secret sharing is replaced with threshold secret sharing. We obtain pseudorandom correlation functions for degree-$1$ Shamir shares of $\mathsf{NC}^1$ correlations from a variety of standard assumptions. We also introduce two new PCG constructions for threshold-shared constant-degree correlations in the regimes where either the privacy threshold $t$ or $n-t$ is a constant. These constructions rely on the conjunction of the LPN and MQ assumptions.

Homomorphic Encryption (HE) allows computations on encrypted data without decryption. It can be used where the users’ information are to be processed by an untrustful server, and has been a popular choice in privacy-preserving applica- tions. However, in order to obtain meaningful results, we have to assume an honest-but-curious server, i.e., it will faithfully follow what was asked to do. If the server is malicious, there is no guarantee that the computed result is correct. The notion of verifiable HE (vHE) is introduced to detect malicious server’s behaviors, but current vHE schemes are either more than four orders of magnitude slower than the underlying HE operations (Atapoor et. al, CIC 2024) or fast but incompatible with server- side private inputs (Chatel et. al, CCS 2024). In this work, we propose a vHE framework ZHE: effi- cient Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) that prove the correct execution of HE evaluations while protecting the server’s private inputs. More precisely, we first design two new highly- efficient ZKPs for modulo operations and (Inverse) Number Theoretic Transforms (NTTs), two of the basic operations of HE evaluations. Then we build a customized ZKP for HE evaluations, which is scalable, enjoys a fast prover time and has a non-interactive online phase. Our ZKP is applicable to all Ring-LWE based HE schemes, such as BGV and CKKS. Finally, we implement our protocols for both BGV and CKKS and conduct extensive experiments on various HE workloads. Compared to the state-of-the-art works, our prover time is very fast: our prover overhead (measured by how many times slower than the underlying HE computation) is one to two orders of magnitude cheaper than state-of-the-arts.

Recent attacks on private set intersection (PSI) and PSI-like protocols have demonstrated that input privacy can be compromised when parties maliciously choose their inputs, even in protocols proven secure against malicious adversaries. To counter such attacks, Authorized PSI (APSI) introduces a judge who authorizes the elements of the parties before the intersection is computed. Falzon and Markatou (PETS 2025) proposed Partial-APSI, a privacy-preserving variant of APSI that prevents revealing the entire set to a judge. Their Partial-APSI protocol requires significant bandwidth overhead due to the use of bilinear pairings and because the judge must sign each element in the input set. In this work, we present a bandwidth-efficient Partial-APSI protocol that outperforms Falzon and Markatou, both asymptotically and empirically. For example, for sets of size $2^{20}$, we require around $21\times$ less bandwidth and are about $6\times$ faster over a LAN network. In addition to our protocol, we model the real-world behavior of rational parties through a game-theoretic analysis. We introduce payout mechanisms for detected cheating and establish lower bounds on their values, ensuring that the best strategy for rational parties is to provide honest input.

Block-Accumulate-Accumulate (BAA) codes provide fast encoding for pseudorandom correlation generators and code-based zero-knowledge. We replace their independently sampled local maps with repeated copies of one fixed short code. This chosen-block construction retains the two permutation-prefix-sum rounds while allowing the constituent code to be selected for distance and efficient implementation. Over $\mathbb{F}_2$, exact weight-distribution propagation gives finite-length distance guarantees. Suitable constituents yield numerical asymptotic distance estimates reaching $99.99\%$ of the Gilbert-Varshamov (GV) distance at rate $1/2$. Our practical binary instantiations encode about a million message symbols in $23$-$24$ ms on one CPU thread and under $6$ ms on $24$-$32$ threads. Over larger fields, we add random nonzero coordinate scalings and account for cancellations. For every field of size $q\ge2^{127}$, including $128$-bit prime fields, Reed-Solomon constituents certify relative distances $0.30$ and $0.60$ at rates $1/2$ and $1/4$, respectively. At message dimension $k=2^{20}$, each distance bound fails with probability below $2^{-137}$ under independent uniform sampling of the permutations and nonzero scalings. The rate-$1/4$ asymptotic distance estimate reaches $81\%$ of large-field GV. To investigate the gap between this estimate and GV, we identify permutation patterns that force low-weight codewords regardless of the nonzero coordinate scalings.

Private information retrieval (PIR) is a fundamental primitive for protecting user privacy. It enables a user to retrieve entries from a public database without revealing which entries are being retrieved. PIR has been studied in many settings, e.g., with information-theoretic or computational security, with a single server or multiple non-colluding servers, and with or without preprocessing to the database. In this article, we describe several PIR schemes that we believe are accessible to readers without prior knowledge in PIR. Although conceptually simple, these schemes capture the main ideas underlying mainstream design paradigms. We also describe extensions of PIR that support keyword queries and batch queries. Beyond describing the schemes themselves, we characterize the concrete efficiency of different PIR paradigms, provide guidance on selecting a paradigm in practice, and discuss practical applications of PIR. We hope this article helps readers understand the current research landscape in PIR and serves as a starting point for exploring more advanced topics in the field.

Deniable Encryption (Canetti et al., CRYPTO 1997) enables parties to produce fake internal states making any transcript consistent with any plaintext of their choice. Fully Deniable Encryption (FDE) (Canetti et al., CRYPTO 2020) achieves the strongest two-party guarantee since both sender and receiver can independently fabricate randomness, even with mutually inconsistent claimed plaintexts, and anyone can fake the receiver's side. However, FDE addresses only post-execution coercion and remains confined to the two-party setting, which leaves both adaptive coercion (where parties may be coerced at any round during execution) and threshold deniability (where secrets are distributed among $n$ parties) as open problems. In this work, we resolve the threshold gap and take a definitional step toward the adaptive one. We design Threshold Fully Deniable Interactive Encryption (TFDE) via FDE with a universal thresholdizer, equivocable commitments, and non-committing encryption via a four-layer equivocation pipeline so that any coalition of fewer than~$t_S$ senders and~$t_R$ receivers can produce per party fake states indistinguishable from honest executions, while satisfying all standard threshold public key encryption properties; like FDE itself, which is a feasibility result. Moreover, we formalize Strong Off-the-Record Deniability (SORD), a new notion that captures adaptive mid-execution coercion and consistent fake claims by both parties.

Passwords remain the dominant authentication method despite weaknesses such as offline dictionary attacks and password reuse. Single Password Authentication (SPA) mitigates these risks by protecting high entropy secrets under one memorable password and distributing them across untrusted storage providers. However, existing SPA schemes cannot prevent preemption and overwrite attacks by storage providers, and they lack secure, efficient support for secret and password updates. We present UpSPA, an efficient, secure, and updatable threshold SPA that addresses both limitations without requiring changes on the login server. UpSPA prevents preemption through a storage provider specific high entropy identifier secret, supports secret updates via implicit authentication, and enables password updates via explicit authentication using a password protected signing key. We prove security in the ideal real paradigm, including resistance to offline dictionary attacks under standard static threshold corruption assumptions. Our evaluation shows low overhead and competitive performance compared to a prior SPA scheme that does not support updates.

Secure communication in the Internet of Things (IoT) requires lightweight protocols that scale across unicast, multicast, and broadcast settings. Existing solutions typically depend on centralized gateways, which introduce single points of failure and scalability limitations. We propose TreeCast, a distributed group key establishment protocol that organizes devices into a binary tree of hashed Diffie–Hellman secrets, which naturally unifies unicast, multicast, and broadcast in a single scalable hierarchical structure. This design yields logarithmic rekey costs, efficient subtree derivation with efficient device addition and revocation in large and dynamic IoT environments and strong security properties including authentication, partial forward secrecy, and post-compromise recovery. We present a detailed security analysis and to demonstrate practical viability, implement TreeCast on an Arm Cortex-M33 using only software cryptography, without any hardware accelerators. Our measurements show that TreeCast performs key establishment and rekeying within realistic IoT timing and energy budgets, achieving sub-millisecond tree updates and low memory footprint. These results establish TreeCast as a lightweight, scalable, and deployable solution for secure communication in next-generation IoT networks.

We consider (boolean or arithmetic) circuits in which every gate may compute an arbitrary function of its input gates. We show a novel tradeoff between a circuit's size and its fan-in: \begin{quote} Any function which may be computed using $s$ fan-in $2$ gates can alternatively be computed using $s/3\ (1+O(1/\sqrt{k}))$ fan-in $k$ gates. \end{quote} This asymptotically improves the previous bound of $2s/5\ (1+O(1/k))$ by Charbit, Couteau, Meyer, and Naserasr [TCC'24]. Among other applications, this improves the communication complexity of secure multiparty computation in the correlated randomness model. \emph{Any} $n$-input $m$-output circuit with $s$ internal gates (over arbitrary binary gates) can be securely computed in the correlated randomness model with per party communication $s/3 + n + m$ and computation $\widetilde{O}(s)$. Our paper stands at the intersection of cryptography, complexity theory, and graph theory, but our main technical contribution is one to extremal combinatorics: we establish that every order-$n$ $2$-degenerate graph admits a planarising set of size at most $\lfloor n/3 \rfloor$. Our main conceptual contribution is to relate the existence of sublinear-size (directed) $k$-path transversals to well-studied graph parameters. Along the way, we uncover a recurringly overstated lemma throughout the literature on sublinear-size vertex-separators and hyperfinite graphs. According to this lemma, any monotone graph class admitting sublinear-size balanced vertex separators should be weakly hyperfinite. However, this is contradicted by a graph class put forward by [Moshkovitz and Shapira, Random Structures \& Algorithms'15]. Unfortunately, the lemma appears in highly influencial works such as [Henzinger, Klein, Rao, and Subramanian, STOC'94 \& JCSS'97], or the textbook of Nešetřil and Ossona de Mendez [\emph{Sparsity}, Springer'12], and in turn it is used in a significant number of papers. Thankfully a slightly weaker version of this lemma is true, with a caveat on how sublinear the vertex separators needs to be, and we provide the correction as a service to the community.

Proving the correctness of computations over a large dataset via succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (SNARKs) entails the large overhead of ``loading'' the dataset in the SNARK. However, certain computations may only need to access a small fraction of the dataset (e.g., a database query that only accesses a subset of table rows and then computes an aggregation function). The standard way of \emph{efficiently} proving such computations is to use \emph{lookup arguments with sublinear prover complexity} to load only necessary data to the SNARK. Unfortunately, all prior schemes are \emph{static}: even a single change to the dataset forces the prover to re-run an expensive pre-processing step, linear to the dataset size. The only exemption is the recent work of Dutta et al., (CCS'24) that proposed a lookup argument with \emph{amortized} sublinear updates---based on re-running the pre-processing phase periodically, when too many changes have been accumulated. In this work, we present Rogue, the first lookup argument with sublinear prover time and updates that \emph{always} take time proportional only to the number of incurred changes. Indeed, Rogue is actually a \emph{matrix lookup argument}, supporting entire row lookups in time proportional to the number of rows (and independent of their size)! It has very good practical performance, e.g., for a $2^{20}\times 2^7$ matrix and $2^{10}$ row accesses, Rogue achieves $\times 21$-$942$ and $\times 76$-$30000$ faster lookups and updates, respectively, compared to prior works. We then use Rogue to build RogueDB, the first verifiable database system for arbitrary SQL queries that supports authenticated indexes, hence achieves prover time sublinear to the database. Compared with prior schemes with succinct proofs, vSQL (Zhang et al., IEEE S\&P'17) and PoneglyphDB (Gu et al., SIGMOD'25), we get $\times 42.8$-$\times 8624.1$ and $\times 149.6$-$\times 11362.4$ faster prover times, for various SQL queries from the TPC-H benchmark.

Adaptor signatures have emerged as a powerful contract-minimal mechanism for fair exchange on blockchains, enabling efficient and privacy-preserving atomic swaps and conditional payments. However, existing adaptor schemes are limited to narrow classes of NP relations (e.g., discrete logarithm secrets) and specific signature schemes, limiting their scope both in terms of constructions and applications. This work addresses this gap by presenting a new framework that supports arbitrary NP relations and a broad range of signature schemes, significantly extending the reach of adaptor signatures beyond prior works and broadening the design space for adaptor signature constructions. Our framework also yields adaptor signatures that are compatible with today's blockchain systems. More specifically, we devise two general compilers for adaptor signatures. First, we show how to efficiently lift adaptor signatures from structured languages (such as discrete log relations) to general NP languages with the help of degree-$2$ homomorphic encryption, resulting in adaptors for standard signature schemes and general NP languages. Secondly, we develop a compiler that transforms any signature scheme with a subliminal channel into an adaptor signature scheme for general NP languages using circuit-private fully homomorphic encryption. Signatures with subliminal channels enable the encoding of witnesses in the signing randomness, and include randomness-recoverable schemes like Schnorr, ECDSA, CL, BBS, as well as salted versions of deterministic signatures schemes like BLS and RSA. Both constructions achieve a novel property called statement truth privacy, which guarantees that a buyer learns nothing about the underlying statement, not even its truth, unless the protocol successfully completes.

In this work, we study the communication complexity of constant-round MPC with guaranteed output delivery (GOD) in Minicrypt. We construct the first MPC protocol in this setting with linear communication complexity of $O(|C|n\kappa+Dn^3\kappa^3+W_I{\sf poly}(n,\kappa))$ bits under the assumption of a random oracle, where $|C|$ is the circuit size, $D$ is the circuit depth, $W_I$ is the number of input wires, and $\kappa$ is the security parameter. In comparison, the previously best-known construction with linear communication ($O(|C|n)$), presented by Goyal et al. (CRYPTO 2020), requires $O(D+n^2)$ round complexity. When targeting $O(D)$ round complexity, the best-known result by Agarwal et al. (ASIACRYPT 2024) still requires $O(|C|n^3)$ communication complexity. More communication is needed to achieve constant round complexity, even with non-black-box use of the underlying cryptographic primitives.

Blind signatures and multi‑signatures are well‑known primitives, but blind multi‑signatures (BMS), which combine both these primitives, were only recently formalized by Karantaidou et al (CCS'24). A BMS scheme allows a user to obtain a compact signature on a common hidden message from a group of signers such that even if the signers collude, they cannot learn the message or link the final signature to any particular interaction. In this paper, we introduce BMuSig2, a 2-round concurrently secure blind multi-signature scheme whose signatures and verification match standard Schnorr signatures. This design enables systems using Schnorr signatures to adopt BMuSig2 as a drop-in replacement, requiring changes only to the issuance phase, while leaving verification unchanged. BMuSig2 builds on MuSig2 multi-signatures (CRYPTO’21) and integrates techniques from a recent blind signature scheme (CRYPTO’24) that leverages non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) arguments and public-key encryption (PKE) to achieve concurrent security. We formally prove the security of BMuSig2 by relying on the unforgeability of MuSig2 and the security of the underlying NIZK and PKE components. We also provide a proof-of-concept implementation to demonstrate its practical efficiency.

As machine learning increasingly moves to edge devices, model owners must trust predictions produced on devices and inputs outside their direct control. This trust is challenged by adversarial inputs, where carefully crafted perturbations can induce incorrect predictions. Existing black-box defenses can detect such inputs using microarchitectural signals, but provide no privacy-preserving mechanism for a remote model owner to verify the detection outcome. In this work, we introduce VERA, a framework for verifiable and privacy-preserving adversarial detection at the edge. VERA combines lightweight Hardware Performance Counter (HPC) monitoring with Zero-Knowledge Range Proofs (ZKRPs). Adversarial perturbations can alter internal activation patterns and consequently the microarchitectural behavior of inference, which can be captured through HPC measurements. Rather than revealing these potentially sensitive measurements, VERA allows an edge device to prove that a committed HPC value lies within a calibrated benign range without disclosing the value itself. This avoids the overhead of general-purpose zk-SNARKs and enables lightweight verification on resource-constrained devices. We formalize VERA as a black-box framework that can combine an HPC-based adversarial detector with an interactive ZKRP, which can also be made non-interactive using the Fiat--Shamir transform. We evaluate VERA against multiple adversarial attacks on MNIST and CIFAR-10. Our results show millisecond-scale verification overhead, with proof-generation costs amortizable across batches of inferences. To the best of our knowledge, VERA is the first framework to provide privacy-preserving cryptographic evidence that an edge inference exhibits microarchitectural behavior within a calibrated benign regime.

This paper introduces Neo, a new lattice-based folding scheme for CCS, an NP-complete relation that generalizes R1CS, Plonkish, and AIR. Neo's folding scheme can be viewed as adapting the folding scheme in HyperNova (CRYPTO'24), which assumes elliptic-curve based linearly homomorphic commitments, to the lattice setting. Unlike HyperNova, Neo can use “small” prime fields (e.g., over the Goldilocks prime). Additionally, Neo provides plausible post-quantum security. Prior to Neo, folding schemes in the lattice setting, notably LatticeFold (ePrint 2024/257), worked with constraint systems defined over a cyclotomic polynomial ring. This structure allows packing a fixed batch of constraint systems over a small prime field into a single constraint system over a polynomial ring. However, it introduces significant overheads, both for committing to witnesses (e.g., the commitment scheme cannot take advantage of bit-width of values), and within the folding protocol itself (e.g., the sum-check protocol is run over cyclotomic polynomial rings). Additionally, the required ring structure places restrictions on the choice of primes (e.g., LatticeFold is not compatible with the Goldilocks field). Neo addresses these problems, by drawing inspiration from both HyperNova and LatticeFold. A key contribution is a folding-friendly instantiation of Ajtai's commitments, with "pay-per-bit" commitment costs i.e., the commitment costs scale with the bit-width of the scalars (e.g., committing to a vector of bits is $32\times$ cheaper than committing to a vector of $32$-bit values). This scheme commits to vectors over a small prime field. It does so by transforming the provided vector into a matrix and committing to that matrix. We prove that this commitment scheme provides the desired linear homomorphism for building a folding scheme. Additionally, like HyperNova, Neo runs a single invocation of the sum-check protocol, where in HyperNova it is over the scalar field of an elliptic curve and in Neo it is over an extension of a small prime field.

We construct the first folding scheme that simultaneously achieves six desirable properties: plausible post-quantum security, pay-per-bit commitment costs, field-native arithmetic (the sum-check and norm checks run purely over a small field), support for general (non-SIMD) constraint systems, small-field support (e.g., Goldilocks), and low recursion overheads. No existing scheme satisfies all six: group-based schemes (e.g., HyperNova) lack post-quantum security and are tied to large elliptic-curve fields; lattice-based schemes (e.g., LatticeFold) require expensive ring arithmetic, lose pay-per-bit costs, and impose SIMD constraints; and hash-based schemes (e.g., Arc) incur large verifier circuits. We present two lattice-based folding schemes for CCS, an NP-complete relation generalizing R1CS, Plonkish, and AIR, called Neo and SuperNeo. Neo satisfies five of the six properties but requires SIMD constraint systems; SuperNeo removes this restriction and satisfies all six. SuperNeo also natively supports CCS relations over arbitrary extension fields of the field underlying the Ajtai commitment, without relying on an NTT embedding. Both run a single invocation of the sum-check protocol over a small field extension and achieve pay-per-bit costs via new folding-friendly instantiations of Ajtai commitments under the Module-SIS assumption. At the core of our constructions are two new norm-preserving embeddings of field vectors into ring vectors that respect an evaluation homomorphism required for folding. We also introduce interactive reductions, a framework that generalizes reductions of knowledge and enables modular security proofs for composed lattice-based protocols.

Zero-knowledge proofs of set membership underpin privacy-preserving constructions such as ring signatures and anonymous credentials. Existing succinct constructions rely mainly on the Fiat--Shamir transform in the Random Oracle Model (ROM), while standard-model non-interactive proofs from post-quantum assumptions remain either generic and inefficient or asymptotically compact yet concretely impractical. A key obstacle is that existing lattice-based zero-knowledge systems operate over a single ambient modulus, forcing heterogeneous components to be homogenized, inflating parameters and weakening reductions. We introduce the first \emph{compact lattice-based NIZK arguments for set membership in the standard model} with proof size logarithmic in the set cardinality. Our construction matches the logarithmic proof size of accumulator-based ROM constructions while achieving post-quantum security without random oracles. The main technical ingredient is a new trapdoor $\Sigma$-protocol supporting linear relations modulo multiple heterogeneous moduli, allowing such relations to be handled at their native moduli without homogenization. This yields a modular approach to compact proofs compatible with lattice accumulators. As an application, we construct lattice-based ring signatures of size $O(\log R)\cdot \widetilde{O}(\lambda^{2})$ bits, improving the dependence on the security parameter $\lambda$ quadratically over the plain-model construction of Chatterjee et al. (CRYPTO~2021) while retaining optimal logarithmic dependence on the ring size $R$. Our construction is in the CRS model, which partly enables this improvement. The scheme achieves statistical anonymity and unforgeability under standard Module-LWE and Module-SIS assumptions. We also develop two additional tools of independent interest: (i) a generalized Merkle-tree accumulator over module lattices with base-$B$ decomposition, enabling finer efficiency--assumption trade-offs; and (ii) a message-binding technique that removes the need for costly lattice one-time signatures in standard-model ring signatures.

Securely shuffling a secret-shared list is a vital sub-protocol in numerous applications, including secure sorting, secure list merging, secure graph processing, oblivious RAM, and anonymous broadcast. We demonstrate how to convert the folklore constant-round protocol for secure shuffling, which employs a delegated Fisher-Yates shuffle using rerandomizable encryption, into a maliciously secure constant-round protocol. This gives the first ever protocol that has linear end-to-end time and communication for a two-party secret-shared shuffle with malicious security. We prove the security of our protocol under the ``linear targeted malleability'' assumption on the homomorphic encryption system, as well as the natural assumptions of efficient ciphertext validity checks and rerandomizability. We also introduce a novel assumption, which we call weak predicability, and show that it is sufficient for security.

Partial fraction decomposition is a fundamental technique in mathematics where products of rational functions can be expressed as sums of fractions. While rational functions have been used in various cryptographic constructions, their rich algebraic structure has not been systematically explored as a direct foundation for building cryptographic primitives. In this work, we describe and exploit two key properties of partial fraction decomposition: (1) the decomposition property itself, which enables efficient set membership testing, and (2) a novel linear independence property arising from the non-singularity of Cauchy matrices, which enables threshold cryptography. We present two main applications. First, we construct a key-value commitment scheme where a dictionary is represented as a linear combination of partial fractions. Our scheme achieves constant-size commitments (a single group element) and proofs, supports homomorphic updates enabling stateless operation, and provides efficient membership and non-membership proofs through simple pairing equations. We also introduce Credential-based Key-Value Commitments, where keys are registered via Boneh-Boyen signatures, enabling applications in permissioned settings. Second, we construct a dynamic threshold encryption scheme leveraging the linear independence of partial fraction products. Our scheme achieves compact ciphertexts, supports public preprocessing of public keys to a succinct encryption key, enables dynamic threshold selection at encryption time, and provides robustness through share verification without random oracles. In particular, we achieve the shortest CPA-secure ciphertext size of 3 group elements, given logarithmic size preprocessed encryption key. We prove security of our constructions in the standard model under new $q$-type assumptions and establish their generic hardness in the generic bilinear group model. Our work demonstrates that working directly with the algebraic structure of rational fractions, rather than converting to polynomial representations, yields elegant and efficient cryptographic constructions with concrete advantages over prior work.