Programme

Day 1

Tuesday 24 September

The main conference will open on Tuesday morning and will be based in the Crausaz-Wordsworth Building (CWB), set in the gardens of Robinson College, the University of Cambridge's newest College. Sessions will run throughout the day. A welcome reception and tour will take place in the early evening at the nearby Department of Computer Science and Technology. 

09:00-09:30 Registration and Coffee

09:30-10:00 Welcome to CANS 2024

10:00-11:00 Keynote

Jens Groth

Zero-knowledge virtual machines and applications

Zero-knowledge proofs are powering an increasing number of applications. A main driver of adoption is that proofs can be succinct. Succinctness allows users to cheaply verify a computation without having to recompute. In the blockchain space, the Ethereum Foundation is now talking about a zero-knowledge singularity, where the main job of the Ethereum chain no longer is to do computation directly but to order and verify batches of external computation. Designing proofs directly for applications is cumbersome and error-prone. Zero-knowledge virtual machines in contrast make it easy for developers to express the statements they want to prove. When using a zkVM you compile a program written in a high-level language, e.g., Rust or Solidity, to a VM program. The zkVM then executes the VM program and attaches a succinct proof to the VM output that it has been correctly computed.

Bio: Jens Groth is Chief Scientist at Nexus. In the past he has been Professor of Cryptology at UCL and Principal Researcher & Director of Research at DFINITY. Groth’s research focus is on zero-knowledge proofs, with notable achievements including the invention of pairing-based SNARKs and co-inventions of pairing-friendly proof systems, logarithmic size proofs in cyclic groups, prover-efficient proofs with constant overhead, and usage of lookups in proving correct machine execution. His contributions have been recognized with test-of-time awards in 2021 and 2023 by the International Association for Cryptologic Research.


11:00-11:30 Coffee

11:30-12:30 Session 1: Multi-party computation

Session chair: Aysajan Abidin

Efficient Secure Multi-Party Computation for Multi-Dimensional Arithmetics and Its Application in Privacy-Preserving Biometric Identification by Dongyu Wu, Bei Liang, Zijie Lu and Jintai Ding

Cryptographic Cryptid Protocols: How to Play Cryptid with Cheaters by Xavier Bultel, Charlène Jojon and Pascal Lafourcade

MaSTer: Maliciously Secure Truncation for Replicated Secret Sharing without Pre-Processing by Martin Zbudila, Erik Pohle, Aysajan Abidin and Bart Preneel

12:30-13:30 Lunch

13:30-14:30 Session 2: Cyber security and leakage

Session chair: Yvo Desmedt

MarcoPolo: A Zero-Permission Attack for Location Type Inference from the Magnetic Field by Beatrice Perez, Abhinav Mehrotra and Mirco Musolesi

Semi-Automated and Easily Interpretable Side-Channel Analysis for Modern JavaScript by Iliana Fayolle, Jan Wichelmann, Anja Köhl, Walter Rudametkin, Thomas Eisenbarth and Clémentine Maurice

Updatable Encryption Secure against Randomness Compromise by Yuichi Tanishita, Ryuya Hayashi, Ryu Ishii, Takahiro Matsuda and Kanta Matsuura. 

14:30-15:00 Coffee

15:00-16:00 Session 3: Provable security

Session chair: Mario Larangeira

How to Apply Fujisaki-Okamoto Transformation to Registration-Based Encryption by Sohto Chiku, Keisuke Hara, Keitaro Hashimoto, Toi Tomita and Junji Shikata

Multi-Query Verifiable PIR and Its Application by Ryuya Hayashi, Junichiro Hayata, Keisuke Hara, Kenta Nomura, Masaki Kamizono and Goichiro Hanaoka

Towards post-quantum secure PAKE - A tight security proof for OCAKE in the BPR model by Nouri Alnahawi, Kathrin Hövelmanns, Andreas Hülsing and Silvia Ritsch

16:00-16:30 Break

16:30-17:00 Walk to the Department of Computer Science and Technology

17:00-18:00 Tours of the Department of Computer Science and Technology

The Department of Computer Science and Technology was established in 1937 and has been at the forefront of teaching, research and technology transfer in computer science ever since. Researchers built the first program-stored computer to enter service in 1949, and started the first formal taught course in computing in 1953. Over the decades the Department has made significant contributions in a wide variety of areas, from theory proving, computer architecture and programming language design to computer networking, security and systems. The tour includes the chance to see the world's first web cam, the CAP Computer and one of the first Raspberry Pi boards along with a wide variety of other research artefacts and technologies.

18:00-19:00 Drinks Reception

The drinks reception will be hosted at the Department of Computer Science and Technology.

Day 2

Wednesday 25 September

The main conference will continue on Wednesday in the Crausaz-Wordsworth Building (CWB). Sessions will run during the morning and early afternoon. In the late afternoon there will be an outing in Cambridge. Attendees can take in the views of the Cambridge cityscape and try their hand at punting on The Backs. In the evening, attendees will dine in The Old Hall at Queens' College, built in 1448.

09:00-09:30 Registration and Coffee

09:30-10:30 Keynote

George Danezis

Modern blockchains for the modern security engineer

Modern blockchains are marvels of cryptography and security engineering. They embody the latest advances in language based security, distributed systems security, advanced cryptography, and security economics. They allow unprecedented expressivity for commercial integrity policies, and unparalleled strength of mechanism. Yet they are still largely used for toy applications. In this talk I discuss how modern blockchains have fundamentally different characteristics from early ones in terms of cost, latency, throughput, scaling, expressivity, governance and power consumption. However the evolution from the old to the modern was slow, full of setbacks, and confusion and the significant shift in capabilities was easy to miss. Using the Sui blockchain as an example, I present the current technologies for high-performance consensus, transaction processing, execution and data dissemination. Then, I argue that modern blockchains are particularly useful as a “consistent core” to engineer large open security protocols: from Multi-Party Computations, Private Information Retrieval, Onion Routing to Certificate / Binary transparency. In brief, assuming their modern capabilities, modern blockchains can resolve the hard coordination problems present in large security systems, in a systematic, performant and secure manner. They are a tool every security engineer needs to have in their toolbox.

Bio: Prof George Danezis, B.A, M.A (Cantab), Ph.D, FBCS. George Danezis is Professor of Security and Privacy Engineering at the Department of Computer Science, University College London. He co-founded and acts as Chief Scientist at Mysten Labs since 2021. George has conducted research on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET) and Decentralised / Distributed Systems Security since 2000. His current research interests focus around secure communications, high-integrity systems to support privacy, blockchains and decentralization. In the past, he co-founded chainspace.io in 2018, and had his team acquired in 2019 by Facebook Novi to help design the Diem payment system. In 2021 he departed and co-founded MystenLabs, to help build the Sui smart contracts platform. He has previously been a Researcher for Microsoft Research, Cambridge; a visiting fellow at K.U.Leuven (Belgium); and a research associate at the University of Cambridge (UK).

10:30-11:00 Coffee

11:00-12:00 Session 4: Blockchain Technology

Session chair: Alptekin Küpçü

Mithril: Stake-based Threshold Multisignatures by Pyrros Chaidos and Aggelos Kiayias

Scalable and Lightweight State-Channel Audits by Christian Badertscher, Dimitris Karakostas, Maxim Jourenko and Mario Larangeira

PARScoin: A Privacy-preserving, Auditable, and Regulation-friendly Stablecoin by Amirreza Sarencheh, Aggelos Kiayias and Markulf Kohlweiss

12:00-13:00 Lunch

13:00-14:20 Session 5: Post-quantum security

Session chair: Dimitris Karakostas

Acceleration of core post-quantum cryptography primitive on open-source silicon platform through hardware/software co-design by Emma Urquhart and Frank Stajano

Compact Adaptor Signature from Isogenies with Enhanced Security by Pratima Jana, Surbhi Shaw and Ratna Dutta

Compact Post-Quantum Bounded-Collusion Identity-based Encryption by Shingo Sato and Junji Shikata

1-out-of N Oblivious Transfer from MLWE by Jingting Xu and Yanbin Pan

14:20-14:50 Coffee

14:50-16:00 Poster session

Everyone, including paper authors and normal attendees, can bring an poster. Posters should be A1 size (or similar). If you would like to bring a poster, and we have not already suggested you bring one, we will undertake a quick review of your proposal, primarily to check fit with the conference research areas and make sure we have enough space. Please see the registration page for further details.

16:00-18:00 Walking tour of Cambridge / Punting

Join us for a guided tour of Cambridge or try your hand at punting on The Backs.

18:00-19:00 Break

19:00-19:30 Arrival event at Queens' College

19:30-20:00 Dinner served in Old Hall at Queens' College

A three-course meal with wine will be served, starting promptly at 19:30 in Old Hall at Queens' College. Old Hall was built in the 1440s and was the primary dining space for students and staff at Queens' until the 1970s. The space provides a very fitting, historical backdrop for CANS 2024 in Cambridge.

Day 3

Thursday 26 September

The final day of the main conference will take place on Wednesday in the Crausaz-Wordsworth Building (CWB). Sessions will run during the morning and afternoon.

09:00-10:00 Registration and Coffee

09:30-10:30 Keynote

Wenjing Lou

Private Communication in Public 5G and Beyond Networks

While softwarization, cloudification, and advanced radio access network (RAN) technologies have been key enablers of current 5G networks, the focuses of next-generation (nextG) mobile networks are likely to shift — integrating AI/ML into networks, adopting Open-RAN architecture, and enhancing security will likely be the key differentiators. This talk centers on security and privacy protection in nextG mobile networks. We will begin with a general discussion of zero-trust architecture, the O-RAN initiative, and key security and privacy challenges in nextG networks. We will then introduce our recent research on enhancing mobile users’ privacy in 5G and beyond networks. I will introduce AAKA, an anonymous authentication and key agreement protocol that allows mobile users to access the mobile network anonymously, effectively thwarting tracking by mobile network operators. I will also introduce UCBlocker, a user-defined, policy-based, end-to-end system to block unwanted calls (e.g., scam and spam calls) in mobile networks. Both works are inspired by emerging decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and anonymous credentials technologies.

Bio: Wenjing Lou is the W. C. English Endowed Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech and a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM. Her research interests cover many topics in the cybersecurity field, with her current research interest focusing on wireless networks, blockchain systems, trustworthy machine learning systems, and security and privacy problems in the Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Prof. Lou is a highly cited researcher by the Web of Science Group. She received the Virginia Tech Alumni Award for Research Excellence in 2018, the highest university-level faculty research award. She received the INFOCOM Test-of-Time paper award in 2020. She was the TPC chair for IEEE INFOCOM 2019 and ACM WiSec 2020. She was the Steering Committee Chair for IEEE CNS conference from 2013 to 2020. She is currently a steering committee member of IEEE INFOCOM and IEEE CNS. She served as a program director at US National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2014 to 2017.

10:30-11:00 Coffee

11:00-12:00 Session 6: Anonmity and privacy

Session chair: Jeyamohan Neera

Taming Delegations in Anonymous Signatures: k-Times Anonymity for Proxy and Sanitizable Signature by Xavier Bultel and Charles Olivier-Anclin

LARMix++: Latency-Aware Routing in Mix Networks with Free Routes Topology by Mahdi Rahimi

On the Anonymity of Linkable Ring Signatures by Xavier Bultel and Charles Olivier-Anclin

12:00-13:00 Lunch

13:00-14:00 Session 7: Cryptanalysis

Session chair: Iliana Fayolle

A Novel Method for Finding Differential-Linear Distinguishers: Application to Midori64, CRAFT, and Skinny64 by Mei Yan, Siwei Chen, Zejun Xiang, Shasha Zhang and Xiangyong Zeng

Truncated Differential Cryptanalysis of the SPRING Block Cipher by Wenchang Zhou and Jiqiang Lu

Collision Attacks on Hashing Modes of Areion by Kodai Taiyama, Kosei Sakamoto, Rentaro Shiba and Takanori Isobe

14:00-14:30 Coffee

14:30-15:30 Session 8: Machine learning and security

Session chair: Mahdi Rahimi

Fault Tolerant and Malicious Secure Federated Learning by Ferhat Karakoç, Alptekin Küpçü and Melek Önen

On the Security of Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning against Model Stealing Attacks by Bhuvnesh Chaturvedi, Anirban Chakraborty, Ayantika Chatterjee and Debdeep Mukhopadhyay

SplitOut: Out-of-the-Box Training-Hijacking Detection in Split Learning via Outlier Detection by Ege Erdogan, Unat Teksen, M. Salih Celiktenyildiz, Alptekin Küpçü and A. Ercument Cicek

15:30-16:00 Closing remarks

Day 4

Friday 27 September

On Friday a workshop on Mobile Systems Security and Privacy will take place in the Department of Computer Science and Technology. All attendees at CANS are welcome to join the workshop without additional charge. We will have nine invited talks delivered by professors from Imperial, KTH Royal Institute of Technology and the Universities of Linz, Oxford, Piraeus, Saskatchewan, Surrey, UCL and Waterloo,  supporting discussion on the latest research challenges and opportunities. Please see the separate workshop page for more information.

09:00-17:30 See the separate workshop page for the complete programme.