Aleksei Udovenko
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affine.group
Aleksei Udovenko
@affine.group
110 followers 59 following 10 posts
Researcher in Cryptography (symmetric-key, white-box, post-quantum, etc.)

https://affine.group
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
wimpouw.bsky.social
Academic publishing is broken due to for-profit actors. Time to explore alternatives as researchers → A Diamond Open Access conference, Feb 5-6, 2026 in Nijmegen NL.

Free registration (limited seats): horizondiamond.nl

Let's build a sustainable publishing infrastructure together.
November 21, 2025 at 9:22 AM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
cryptoexpertssas.bsky.social
🎓 Big congratulations to Nicolas Bon, who brilliantly defended his PhD last Friday on homomorphic encryption!
We’re extremely proud of his work and delighted that he’s continuing the adventure with us at CRX 💫
November 19, 2025 at 8:53 AM
affine.group
Some "non-profit" publishers (IEEE, ACM) also charge unreasonable journal APCs ($1k-$3k USD or more). This also makes damage by normalizing APCs, since one would expect "member-driven" non-profits to optimize the costs. And this instead of leading the movement against commercial punlishers.
hansonmark.bsky.social Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 10d
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 17, 2025 at 4:15 PM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
gro-tsen.bsky.social
These very nice slides by Marie Farge on how researchers can regain control of publication have been brought to my attention: openscience.ens.fr/MARIE_FARGE/... — I think they're worth spreading more widely!
Slide titled “How can researchers regain control of publication?” by Marie Farge (from a talk given on 2025-09-02 in Milan at the International Conference on Optimization and Decision Science).
November 17, 2025 at 11:26 AM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
paolocrosetto.bsky.social
We *are* doing this.

There is the @unjournal.bsky.social. There is Peer Community In @peercommunityin.bsky.social. There are dozens of newly-founded diamond OA (free to read, free to publish) journals being born, eg Experimental Philosophy @xphilosopher.bsky.social.
November 14, 2025 at 11:20 AM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
aumasson.jp
new blog post bfswa.substack.com/p/6-years-af...
6 years after too much crypto
Test of time passed
bfswa.substack.com
November 17, 2025 at 6:09 AM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
dannykay68.bsky.social
EXCELLENT graphic on the drain of scientific publishing! zenodo.org/records/1759...
November 15, 2025 at 4:04 AM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
eprint.ing.bot
UP TO 50% OFF: Efficient Implementation of Polynomial Masking (Jorge Andresen, Paula Arnold, Sebastian Berndt, Thomas Eisenbarth, Sebastian Faust, Marc Gourjon, Eric Landthaler, Elena Micheli, Maximilian Orlt, Pajam Pauls, Kathrin Wirschem, Liang Zhao) ia.cr/2025/2088
Abstract. While passive probing attacks and active fault attacks have been studied for multiple decades, research has only started to consider combined attacks that use both probes and faults relatively recently. During this period, polynomial masking became a promising, provably secure countermeasure to protect cryptographic computations against such combined attacks. Unlike other countermeasures, such as duplicated additive masking, polynomial masking can be implemented using a linear number of shares, as shown by Berndt et al. at CRYPTO ’23. Based upon this fact, Arnold et al. noted at CHES ’24 that polynomial masking is particularly well-suited for parallel computation. This characteristic is especially effective in scenarios involving multiple circuits with identical structures, such as the 16 SBoxes in AES. Just recently, Faust et al. showed at CHES ’25 that one can also incorporate the technique of packed secret sharing into these masking schemes, given that the state-of-the-art polynomial masking scheme is secure against combined attacks. In this work, we present provably secure advancements regarding this state-of-the-art scheme in both computational and randomness efficiency, reducing the randomness complexity by up to 50% and the computational complexity even more by going from a quadratic term to a linear one for many parameters. Moreover, we present the first implementation of a polynomial masking scheme against combined attacks along with an extensive experimental evaluation for a wide range of parameters and configurations as well as a statistical leakage detection to evaluate the security of the implementation on an Arm Cortex-M processor. Our implementation is publicly available to encourage further research in practical combined resilience. Image showing part 2 of abstract.
November 13, 2025 at 2:58 PM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
maria.isogeny.club
Catch up on last weeks Isogeny Club talk! We welcomed Eli Orvis who taught us about abstract isogeny graphs: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzcc...
The Isogeny Club #7.4 Ihara zeta functions of abstract isogeny graphs and modular curves
YouTube video by The Isogeny Club
www.youtube.com
November 13, 2025 at 9:54 AM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
giacomofenzi.bsky.social
We present Tensorswitch🧮:
a new nearly optimal hash-based polynomial commitment scheme from tensor codes!

Joint work with Benedikt Bünz, Ron Rothblum and @defund.bsky.social

📚: ia.cr/2025/2065
November 13, 2025 at 10:11 AM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
paolocrosetto.bsky.social
What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma.

It's *scientific publishing*.

We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_...

Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇
November 12, 2025 at 10:31 AM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
eprint.ing.bot
On the Dangers of RSA Exponent Transforms (Eugene Lau, Laura Shea, Nadia Heninger) ia.cr/2025/2079
Abstract. We analyze the security of RSA keys where the public exponent e is larger than φ(N). While nearly all real-world applications of RSA use a small set of pre-determined constant values for e, the literature contains a number of constructions involving large special-form exponents. Examples include proposed countermeasures against Wiener’s attack on small RSA private exponents, exponent masking against side channels, a 2018 proposal by Joye and Michalevsky to extend the usefulness of hardware security modules, and a 2023 RSA blind signature construction by Amjad, Yeo, and Yung. We give an efficient algorithm to factor an RSA modulus N given an integer a that is “close” to a multiple of φ(N). That is, we can factor N in polynomial time given φ(N) < a ≤ N^(3/2) if there is an integer y with |y| ≤ aN^(−3/4) such that a − y ≡ 0 mod  φ(N). Our attack is a special case of Blömer and May’s 2004 algorithm using Coppersmith’s method that enables us to give stronger bounds for our application range of interest. We instantiate our attack against several constructions and exhibit families of weak public exponents that do not appear to have been analyzed in the literature. In particular, the Joye and Michalevsky exponent transform permits full key recovery if used for small public exponents. While it is well known that RSA is vulnerable for small private exponent d, our work suggests that care must also be taken when generating large public exponents, or when publishing transformed exponents. Image showing part 2 of abstract.
November 13, 2025 at 12:26 AM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
eprint.ing.bot
Partial Fraction Techniques for Cryptography (Charanjit S. Jutla, Rohit Nema, Arnab Roy) ia.cr/2025/2081
Abstract. 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. Image showing part 2 of abstract. Image showing part 3 of abstract.
November 13, 2025 at 12:26 AM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
eprint.ing.bot
Strong Pseudorandom Functions in AC⁰[2] in the Bounded-Query Setting (Marshall Ball, Clément Ducros, Saroja Erabelli, Lisa Kohl, Nicolas Resch) ia.cr/2025/2085
Abstract. Understanding the minimal computational power needed to realize a pseudorandom function (PRF) is a long-standing question in cryptography. By the Razborov–Smolensky polynomial approximation method, it is known that AC⁰[2] cannot support strong pseudorandom functions with subexponential security, since any such function can be distinguished from random with quasipolynomially many samples. In this work, we initiate the study of low-complexity strong PRFs under a refined framework that separates adversary query complexity from running time, and observe that distinguishing algorithms for AC⁰[2] do not apply if the number of queries is below the threshold implied by the Razborov–Smolensky approximation bound. We propose the first candidate strong PRF in AC⁰[2], which plausibly offers subexponential security against adversaries limited to a fixed quasipolynomial number of queries. We show that our candidate lacks heavy Fourier coefficients, resists a natural class of adaptive attacks, has high rational degree, is non-sparse over 𝔽₂ in expectation, and has low correlation with fixed function families. Finally, we show that if any strong PRF exists in AC⁰[2] (or a superclass), then we can construct a universal PRF, i.e., a single, fixed function which is guaranteed to be a strong PRF in the same class. Image showing part 2 of abstract.
November 13, 2025 at 12:27 AM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
eprint.ing.bot
Improvements to Lucas-sequence modular square roots and primality testing (Mike Hamburg) ia.cr/2025/2083
Abstract. Lucas sequences are a helpful tool in mathematical and cryptographic calculations, providing in particular an efficient way to exponentiate in a quotient ring R[x]/(x² − Px + Q). As with exponentiation in other finite rings and fields, we can use the periodic nature of these sequences to find roots of polynomials. Since they behave differently in the ring ℤ/N depending on whether N is prime, Lucas sequences are also useful for primality testing. In this paper, we discuss improvements to Lucas-sequence algorithms for square roots and heuristic primality testing. Our first application is modular square roots. It is straightforward to take square roots modulo primes p ≡ {3, 5, 7} mod 8. When p ≡ 1 mod 8, and especially when p − 1 is divisible by many powers of 2, Müller’s algorithm and Kim-Koo-Kwon are attractive options. Both of these use Lucas sequences. Here we show how to simplify and speed up Kim-Koo-Kwon. We also show a variant on Müller’s algorithm which works even when p ≡ 3 mod 4, which would be useful if p were secret. Our second application is heuristic primality testing. The Baillie-PSW primality test combines a strong Fermat test with a strong Lucas test. The recent Baillie-Fiori-Wagstaff variant strengthens Baillie-PSW. Here we show an improved variant, SuperBFPSW, which is stronger than Baillie-Fiori-Wagstaff, but also faster than the original Ballie-PSW. Image showing part 2 of abstract.
November 13, 2025 at 12:27 AM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
hansonmark.bsky.social
Fundamentally, what we need is leadership. But we break with the chorus of most #OpenScience initiatives here and emphasize very strongly that this leadership must come from funders and institutions.

We researchers can support the battle, but we cannot lead the charge. Funders hold the cards.

6/n
The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
brendannyhan.bsky.social
A staggering statistic: "North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year." What are we doing?
hansonmark.bsky.social Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 10d
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 12, 2025 at 1:58 PM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
eprint.ing.bot
The Algebraic CheapLunch: Extending FreeLunch Attacks on Arithmetization-Oriented Primitives Beyond CICO-1 (Antoine Bak, Augustin Bariant, Aurélien Boeuf, Pierre Briaud, Morten Øygarden, Atharva Phanse) ia.cr/2025/2040
Abstract. The security of many arithmetization-oriented (AO) hash functions depends of the hardness of Constrained-input constrained-output (CICO) problems. These problems have received significant attention from the cryptographic community in recent years, with notable advances in Gröbner basis and resultant-based attacks, yet progress has mainly been limited to CICO problems restricted to a single output. In this work, we build on the “FreeLunch method” of Bariant et al. (Crypto 2024) that constructs Gröbner bases “for free” in this particular case, and extend it to CICO problems with multiple outputs. More precisely, we consider tools for solving weighted polynomial systems, and show how to apply them in the AO setting. This results in new polynomial modelings, more efficient methods for computing the initial Gröbner basis under certain assumptions, and improved complexity estimates for the change of ordering step, derived from tighter upper bounds on the ideal degree. We apply our framework to Poseidon, Neptune and XHash8, where our assumptions are experimentally verified, and theory matches practice. For Griffin and ArionHash our assumptions are not verified, leaving us with improved, yet loose, upper bounds on the ideal degree. While our results do not threaten the security of any full-round hash function, they provide new insights into the security of these primitives under more general CICO problems. Image showing part 2 of abstract.
November 5, 2025 at 8:58 PM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
cosic.bsky.social
Great news: the paper "Integral cryptanalysis in characteristic $p$" by our researchers Tim Beyne & Michiel Verbauwhede will receive the Best Theory and Early Career Award at #Asiacrypt 2025!
asiacrypt.iacr.org/2025/program...
November 3, 2025 at 10:20 AM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
gloupin.bsky.social
Linkedin is once again planning on using your data for AI and oddly, its been toggled back on...

www.linkedin.com/mypreference...
LinkedIn Login, Sign in | LinkedIn
Login to LinkedIn to keep in touch with people you know, share ideas, and build your career.
www.linkedin.com
November 3, 2025 at 1:22 AM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
eprint.ing.bot
When the Wrong Key Lives On: The Key-Recovery Procedure in Integral Attacks (Christof Beierle, Gregor Leander, Yevhen Perehuda) ia.cr/2025/2011
Abstract. An integral distinguisher for a block cipher is defined by a nontrivial subset of plaintexts for which the bitwise sum of (parts of) a certain internal state is independent of the secret key. Such a distinguishing property can be turned into a key-recovery procedure by partially decrypting the ciphertexts under all possible keys and then filtering the key candidates using the integral distinguisher. The behavior of this filter has never been analyzed in depth, and we show that the ubiquitous hypothesis about its behavior is incorrect. Fortunately, the deviation is either limited or can be lifted to improve the underlying attacks. By algorithmically determining the exact subspaces of key candidates to be guessed - whose dimensions are often lower than expected - we are able to improve upon the best known integral key-recovery attacks on various ciphers.
November 1, 2025 at 1:33 AM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
error024.bsky.social
🎓 After 4 years, 7 papers, countless joyful moments, and meeting so many great people along the way, I’m excited to share that I’ve officially obtained my PhD!

It’s been an incredible journey of learning, persistence, and growth.

My thesis is now available here:
🔗 pure.tue.nl/ws/portalfil...
October 28, 2025 at 10:17 AM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
patrickmccray.bsky.social
The university email telling me to do mandated cybersecurity training contains all of the warning signs - implied threat; mysterious link to click; sense of urgency - that we are supposed to beware of in phishing emails.
October 25, 2025 at 12:46 PM
Reposted by Aleksei Udovenko
mccurley.bsky.social
I spent two years building a piece of infrastructure for open access publishing in CS arxiv.org/abs/2504.10424. I've gotten positive feedback from authors, but most are quite ignorant about how publishing works (even in computer science). Thankfully we don't have to accept Microsoft Word.😁
Lowering the Cost of Diamond Open Access Journals
Many scholarly societies face challenges in adapting their publishing to an open access model where neither authors nor readers pay any fees. Some have argued that one of the main barriers is the actu...
arxiv.org
October 25, 2025 at 4:49 PM