Dagstuhl-Seminar "Guardians of the Galaxy"

11 March 2025

Prof. Manulis recently participated in the prestigious Dagstuhl Seminar titled "Guardians of the Galaxy: Protecting Space Systems from Cyber Threats," held from March 2 to March 7, 2025. Attendance at Dagstuhl Seminars is by invitation only, bringing together leading experts from academia and industry to address critical challenges.

The seminar focused on pressing cybersecurity issues within the space sector, aiming to discuss current R&D challenges in the protection of space infrastructure and satellite communications against a growing number of cyber-attacks. Key topics included enhancing the resilience of space vehicles, securing ground segment operations critical for mission control, safeguarding communication links against eavesdropping and interference, and transitioning to post-quantum cryptography.

PACY at FHE / RWC 2025 in Sofia

A series of high-profile scientific events in the field of cryptography took place last week in Sofia, drawing experts, researchers, and industry leaders from around the globe. Among the attendees were Prof. Mark Manulis and Jerome Nguyen from PACY Lab, who participated in two major gatherings: the annual conference on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE 2025) and the Real World Cryptography Symposium (RWC 2025). FHE 2025 brought together leading academics and practitioners to discuss the latest advances in fully homomorphic encryption—a breakthrough technology that allows computation on encrypted data without needing to decrypt it first. The conference featured sessions on practical implementations, performance improvements, and real-world use cases of FHE in cloud computing, finance, and healthcare. Meanwhile, RWC 2025 focused on bridging the gap between academic cryptography and its practical applications. Key topics included secure messaging, post-quantum cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, and cryptographic protocols used in industry-scale systems. The presence of PACY Lab representatives highlighted their continued contribution to cutting-edge research and their engagement with the broader cryptographic community. Both events offered invaluable opportunities for knowledge exchange, networking, and collaborative exploration of the challenges and possibilities at the forefront of secure digital communication.

Nick Frymann's successful PhD viva in the UK

Nick Frymann, an external PhD student of Prof. Manulis, has defended his PhD viva at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom. Nick's PhD thesis titled "Asynchronous Remote Key Generation and its Applications in W3C WebAuthn and FIDO" proposed several technical contributions to the WebAuthn standard, aiming to address scenarios where users lose authentication tokens or need to delegate access to their web accounts without compromising privacy and security. Dr. Frymann serves as a Lecturer at the University of Surrey, where Prof. Manulis has a Visiting Professor appointment.

Invited Talk at SKECH 2024 in Bertinoro

At the 5th workshop "SKECH@BiCi: Secure Key Exchange and Channel Protocols" Prof. Manulis gave an invited talk on "Asynchronous Remote Key Generation (ARKG) and its Applications" on June 5th in Bertinoro, Italy. ARKG is a new variant of a key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) that allows a sender to encapsulate a cryptographic key pair (sk, pk) for the intended recipient in such a way that only the recipient can later compute the private key sk. The pair (sk, pk) can be used as its own freshly generated key pair in public key cryptosystems. Since its introduction in 2020, ARKG has proven to be a versatile building block that enables a range of different privacy-protecting applications in the field of authentication and blockchains. The biennial SKECH workshop brings together renowned researchers working on cryptographic protocols for secure messaging and key management to discuss the latest research developments. Participation in a SKECH workshop is only possible with a prior personal invitation.

PACY at EUROCRYPT 2024 in Zurich

The annual EUROCRYPT conference, which was held in Zurich in May 2024, is one of the most important scientific conferences in the field of cryptography and PACY Lab was there. Jerome Nguyen (pictured) presented the results of the new research work from his joint publication with Prof. Manulis. The work entitled “Fully Homomorphic Encryption beyond IND-CCA1 Security: Integrity through Verifiability” sets new security standards for fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and strengthens all previously known security requirements for such schemes. The paper also presents design approaches on how to achieve these stronger security properties for known FHE constructions.

Papers accepted at EUROCRYPT 2024 and USENIX Security 2024

A strong start of the year for the PACY Lab with two papers accepted to flagship conferences on the topic of confidential computing over encrypted data: "Fully Homomorphic Encryption beyond IND-CCA1 Security: Integrity through Verifiability" accepted at EUROCRYPT 2024 introduces so-far strongest FHE security guarantees and general techniques achieving integrity and verifiability for (outsourced) FHE computations. It is also the first publication of Jérôme Nguyen. "FEASE: Fast and Expressive Asymmetric Searchable Encryption" appearing at USENIX Security 2024 is a result of collaboration with researchers from Surrey Centre for Cyber Security and our contribution to the EU H2020 project SECANT. The paper features the so-far fastest construction and implementation of a public key encryption scheme supporting private search queries over encrypted indexed data.

Co-Organisation of SECITC 2023 in Bucharest

SECITC (International Conference on Security for Information Technology and Communications) is an annual international conference held in Romania that deals with all theoretical and practical aspects of information technology and communications security. Prof. Manulis was invited to participate in SECITC 2023 in Bukharest from November 23rd to 24th as a PC Chair. The conference program included 14 peer-reviewed papers and 3 invited talks given by Prof. Bart Preneel from KU Leuven, Prof. Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi from TU Darmstadt, and Prof. Ivan Visconti from the University of Salerno. The publication of conference proceedings in an LNCS volume by Springer is expected for 2024.