NTT Wins Two Best Paper Awards at Flagship Conference Crypto 2020

Research in the two papers Focuses on Differential Linear and Chosen Ciphertext Attacks

Palo Alto, Calif. – August 19, 2020 – NTT Research, Inc., a division of NTT (TYO:9432), today announced that two of the three Best Paper award winners at Crypto 2020, one of the leading international conferences on cryptologic research, were co-authored by NTT cryptographers. Dr. Yosuke Todo, a senior researcher at the Secure Platforms Labs, part of the Service Innovation Laboratory Group of NTT Corporation, was one of the authors of the paper titled, “Improved Differential-Linear Attacks with Applications to ARX Ciphers.” Dr. Brent Waters, a distinguished scientist at NTT Research and professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, co-authored the paper titled, “Chosen Ciphertext Security from Injective Trapdoor Functions.” Organized by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), this year’s online Crypto 2020 conference opened on August 17 and will feature several keynotes and more than 80 papers over four days.

Dr. Todo’s paper is a joint study with Professor Gregor Leander and Dr. Christof Beierle of Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB), where Dr. Todo is a visiting researcher. In this paper, Dr. Todo and his co-authors offer a developed theory of cryptanalysis called differential linear attack and evaluate the security of ARX-type cipher, which has excellent performance in a software environment. The cryptanalysis method presented in this paper will play an important role as security criteria in cryptographic designs studied around the world. Dr. Todo was a co-author on another paper accepted at Crypto 2020, “Out of Oddity – New Cryptanalytic Techniques against Symmetric Primitives Optimized for Integrity Proof Systems.”

The Best Paper by Dr. Waters and his co-authors, Drs. Susan Hohenberger and Venkata Koppula, propose an epoch-making construction method to meet Chosen Ciphertext Attack (CCA) security, which is an important security requirement of public key cryptosystems. They show a new design of CCA security from injective trapdoor functions. Dr. Hohenberger is a research professor in the Information Security Group at the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering. Dr. Koppula is a member of the faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Dr. Waters also co-authored a second paper accepted at Crypto 2020, “New Constructions of Hinting PRGs, OWSs with Encryption, and more.”

This year’s third Best Paper award, “Breaking the decisional Diffie-Hellman problem for class group actions using genus theory,” was authored by Dr. Wouter Castryck, Jana Stáková and Dr. Frederik Vercauteren. Drs. Castryck and Vercauteren are members of the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography (COSIC) research group in the Department of Electrical Engineering at KU Leuven. Ms. Stáková is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam, and part of the QuSoft Crypto Group.

The IACR organizes three main conferences each year. In addition to Crypto, it also hosts EuroCrypt and AsiaCrypt. Each year the IACR presents three Test of Time Awards for papers delivered at these conferences 15 years earlier. In April 2020, the IACR announced that a paper co-authored by Dr. Waters and Dr. Amit Sahai, a professor of computer science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering in 2005, had received a Test of Time Award for a paper they presented at EuroCrypt 2005. According to the CORE Conference Ranking, which provides assessments of major conferences in the computing disciplines, these two conferences are ranked as flagship conferences, leading venues in the area of cryptography.

About NTT Research

NTT Research opened its Palo Alto offices in July 2019 as a new Silicon Valley startup to conduct basic research and advance technologies that promote positive change for humankind. Currently, three labs are housed at NTT Research: the Physics and Informatics (PHI) Lab, the Cryptography and Information Security (CIS) Lab, and the Medical and Health Informatics (MEI) Lab. The organization aims to upgrade reality in three areas: 1) quantum information, neuro-science and photonics; 2) cryptographic and information security; and 3) medical and health informatics. NTT Research is part of NTT, a global technology and business solutions provider with an annual R&D budget of $3.6 billion.

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