Ing. Ivana Singr

Stať ve sborníku

10.1145/3719027.3765201

Katedra informační bezpečnosti

Cryptography competitions often contribute to the development and standardization of new cryptographic schemes. They help select primitives and algorithms that solve specific cryptographic problems securely and efficiently from a list of candidate submissions. Over the last decades, several competitions held by NIST and other research and regulatory organizations resulted in standards for, e.g., symmetric and asymmetric encryption, hashing, digital signatures, and, most recently, quantum-secure cryptography. However, while these competitions fostered much technical research on the submitted schemes, little is currently known about the human aspects of their processes, how they shape the competition results, and their perceived impact on cryptography security. To investigate human aspects of cryptography competitions, we interviewed 20 experienced cryptography competition participants about their experiences, their assessment of the competitions' impact and its determinants, and their suggestions for future events. We find that competitions bring attention to a cryptography area, provide research focus and motivation, and establish trust in schemes through community scrutiny and collaboration. Our participants highlighted the criticality of transparency, fairness, and trustworthiness of the competition organizer, emphasizing a need for clear and open communication. Based on these findings, we suggest strategies for future competitions to maximize engagement and provide transparent, trustworthy processes and results. We recommend stronger moderation of social conduct on official channels to ensure fairness and prevent putting off potential contributors. We also find that substantial industry involvement and systematic feedback collection are critical. Transparent organization and evaluation elevate the competition and foster secure and well-adopted standards.

Stať ve sborníku

Katedra informační bezpečnosti

Implementing cryptographic standards is a critical process for the cryptographic ecosystem. Cryptographic standards aim to support developers and engineers in implementing cryptographic primitives and protocols. However, past security incidents suggest that implementing cryptographic standards can be challenging and might jeopardize software and hardware security. We need to understand and mitigate the pain points of those implementing cryptographic standards to support them better. To shed light on the challenges and obstacles of implementing cryptographic standards, we conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with experienced cryptographers and cryptographic software engineers. We identify common practices when implementing standards, including the criticality of reference and third-party implementations, test vectors to verify implementations, and the open standard community as central support for questions and reviews of implementations. Based on our findings, we recommend transparent standardization processes, strong (ideally formal) verification, improved support for comparing implementations, and covering updates and error handling in the standardization process.

Článek

10.1109/MSEC.2024.3449809

Katedra informační bezpečnosti

We interviewed cryptography experts from academia and industry to learn from their experiences with the design and deployment of cryptographic protocols. We present adoption challenges, including misaligned incentives in academia and standardization, mismatched assumptions, low-quality reference implementations, and usability issues.

Stať ve sborníku

Katedra informační bezpečnosti

Cryptography serves as the cornerstone of information security and privacy in modern society. While notable progress has been made in the implementation of cryptographic techniques, a substantial portion of research outputs in cryptography, which strive to offer robust security solutions, are either implemented inadequately or not at all. Our study aims to investigate the challenges involved in bringing cryptography innovations from papers to products. To address this open question, we conducted 21 semistructured interviews with cryptography experts who possess extensive experience (10+ years) in academia, industry, and nonprofit and governmental organizations. We aimed to gain insights into their experiences with deploying cryptographic research outputs, their perspectives on the process of bringing cryptography to products, and the necessary changes within the cryptography ecosystem to facilitate faster, wider, and more secure adoption. We identified several challenges including misunderstandings and miscommunication among stakeholders, unclear delineation of responsibilities, misaligned or conflicting incentives, and usability challenges when bringing cryptography from theoretical papers to end-user products. Drawing upon our findings, we provide a set of recommendations for cryptography researchers and practitioners. We encourage better supporting cross-disciplinary engagement between cryptographers, standardization organizations, and software developers for increased cryptography adoption.

Stať ve sborníku

10.1109/ISEA-ISAP49340.2020.234994

Fakulta informačních technologií

Homomorphic encryption enables computations with encrypted data, however, in its plain form, it does not guarantee that the computation has been performed honestly. For the Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), a verifiable variant emerged soon after the introduction of FHE itself, for a single-operation homomorphic encryption (HE), particular verifiable variant has been introduced recently, called the VeraGreg Framework. In this paper, we identify a weakness of List Non-Malleability as defined for the VeraGreg framework—an analogy to the classical Non-Malleability—and define a stronger variant, which addresses the weakness and which we show not to be strengthenable any more. Next, we suggest a decomposition of the abstract VeraGreg framework, introduce novel notions of security for the resulting components and show some reductions between them and/or their combinations. We conjecture that VeraGreg achieves the strongest (and desirable) security guarantee if and only if its building blocks achieve certain, much more tangible properties. Finally, we suggest a simplification to the original VeraGreg instantiation, which now relies on hardness of particular kind of the famous Shortest Vector Problem for lattices.