Much of cryptography today is tailored for specialized domains, such as Internet of Things (IoT), privacy-preserving (PP) data computation in the Cloud and cryptocurrencies. Cross-domain security solutions like Blockchain-for-IoT or IoT-for-Cloud can enable PP device/entity identification or PP computation over IoT data with Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) and multi-party computation (MPC) protocols, respectively. A major obstacle for combining these paradigms lies in the present technology and security gaps: on one hand, the symmetric cryptography needs to be resource optimized (lightweight and binary) and classically secure for IoT, on the other it has to be co-developed with the ZKP or MPC protocol layers (algebraic) and satisfy specific protocol security in the Cloud.

In this project we will develop symmetric cryptography that empowers the product of LW with ZKP, and with MPC for cross-domain applications. We will develop formal security framework (specific to concrete threats), build suitable supporting hash functions, ciphers, encryption/authentication modes, and benchmark them.

Some of our ideas stem from works of the Core Team members, such as the Eevee authenticated encryption [1], forkcipher [2], MiMC [3] and Poseidon [4] designs. Our new designs will provide the first theoretically sound, yet practice-oriented LW and PP symmetric algorithms for cross-domain IoT and Cloud applications. Our results will be supported by cryptanalysis and security proofs.