General information

We are pleased to announce that 22nd Central European Conference on Cryptography (CECC 2022) will be held in Smolenice, Slovakia, on June 26 - 29, 2022. The conference has become a traditional meeting point for people involved in cryptology. The aim of the conference is to gather people interested in discussing recent advances in all areas of cryptology, and experience in teaching the subject. All participants are encouraged to present a contributed talk.

The conference will take place in the Congress Center of Smolenice Castle. For further information please refer to the contact and travel information or contact the organizers.

CECC 2022 is organized by:

• Institute of Mathematics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia
• Institute of Computer Science and Mathematics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Slovak University of Technology, Bratislava, Slovakia

Aims and scope of the conference

The aim of CECC 2022 is to bring together researchers in all aspects of cryptology, including (but not limited to):

• cryptanalysis,
• cryptographic applications in information security,
• design of cryptographic systems,
• encryption schemes,
• general cryptographic protocols,
• post-quantum cryptography,
• pseudorandomness,
• signature schemes,
• steganography.

AKMIS Workshop

AKMIS workshop will be co-located with CECC 2022. This is the 2nd Workshop on Application of Knowledge Methods in Information Security (AKMIS) which aims to become an annual event of the research community working on the knowledge methods in ontologies and knowledge-sharing that focus, but not exclusively, on information security.

Conference history

• 21st Central European Conference on Cryptography, 2021, Debrecen, Hungary
• 20th Central European Conference on Cryptography, 2020, Zagreb, Croatia
• 19th Central European Conference on Cryptography, 2019, Telč, Czechia
• 18th Central European Conference on Cryptography, 2018, Smolenice, Slovakia
• 17th Central European Conference on Cryptography, 2017, Warsaw, Poland
• 16th Central European Conference on Cryptography, 2016, Piestany, Slovakia
• 15th Central European Conference on Cryptography, 2015, Klagenfurt, Austria
• 14th Central European Conference on Cryptography, 2014, Budapest, Hungary
• 13th Central European Conference on Cryptography, 2013, Telč, Czechia
• 12th Central European Conference on Cryptography, 2012, Smolenice, Slovakia
• 11th Central European Conference on Cryptography, 2011, Debrecen, Hungary
• 10th Central European Conference on Cryptography, 2010, Bedlewo, Poland
• 9th Central European Conference on Cryptography, 2009, Třebíč, Czechia
• 8th Central European Conference on Cryptography, 2008, Graz, Austria
• TATRACRYPT '07, 2007, Smolenice, Slovakia
• NYÍRCRYPT '06, 2006, Nyíregyháza, Hungary
• MoraviaCrypt '05, 2005, Brno, Czechia
• WARTACRYPT '04, 2004, Bedlewo, Poland
• TATRACRYPT '03, 2003, Bratislava, Slovakia
• HajduCrypt '02, 2002, Debrecen, Hungary
• TATRACRYPT '01, 2001, Liptovský Ján, Slovakia

Proceedings

• Proceedings of Central European Conference on Cryptology (CECC22)
• Errata

Call for papers

Central European Conference on Cryptography is an annual conference, focusing on all aspects of cryptology. The conference will take place in Smolenice Castle, Slovakia from Sunday, June 26 to Wednesday, June 29, 2022.

The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers in all aspects of cryptology, including but not limited to:

• cryptanalysis,
• cryptographic applications in information security,
• design of cryptographic systems,
• encryption schemes,
• general cryptographic protocols,
• post-quantum cryptography,
• pseudorandomness,
• signature schemes,
• cryptocurrencies, blockchain
• steganography.

Submissions must come in the form of a 2-4 page long extended abstract. Submissions must describe novel original work of the authors. Page limit for extended abstracts is strictly enforced, but the bibliography is excluded from the limit. Extended abstract should be submitted no later than April 08, 2022 April 24, 2022 (extended) to EasyChair conference system. The submissions will be reviewed by the program committee and authors will be informed about acceptance or rejection by April 29, 2022 May 15, 2022. Authors of accepted extended abstracts should present their work at the conference (or virtually, in case of a hybrid format). Accepted extended abstracts of registered participants will be published in conference abstract proceedings available to conference participants.

After the conference, authors of the accepted talks are invited to submit a full length paper for a special issue of the journal Tatra Mountains Mathematical Publications (TMMP) devoted to Cryptography. Submission deadline for full papers is September 30, 2022. Full papers will be reviewed separately, with the standard review process of the TMMP journal.

Extended abstract submission

Link to EasyChair submission system: EasyChair CECC 2022

Important dates

• April 08, 2022 April 24, 2022 (extended): Submission of abstracts
• April 29, 2022 May 15, 2022: Author notification
• June 26-29, 2022: The Conference
• September 30, 2022: Post-conference Proceedings

Official Program

Sunday, June 26

Monday, June 27

Tuesday, June 28

Wednesday, June 29

Invited speakers

4 invited talks are planned for the conference to be given by our distinguished guests:

• Łukasz Chmielewski: Practical Side-Channel Attacks on Public-Key Cryptosystems
  Masaryk University, Czechia and Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

  Abstract:

  This presentation covers the topic of the side-channel analysis (SCA) of public-key cryptographic implementations, in particular Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) schemes. SCA is a research area in applied cryptography that has continuously gained prominence since the late nineties. It considers adversaries leveraging the physical aspect of actual devices running cryptographic implementations. The goal of the talk is to present how in the recent 20 years new public-key implementations protected with new SCA countermeasures lead to more sophisticated SCA attacks (and vice versa). Firstly, I introduce how classical vertical attacks (for example, Simple Power Analysis and Differential Power Analysis) work against public-key implementations. Secondly, I explain the limitations of such attacks when applied to RSA (or ECC) implementations protected with various SCA countermeasures. Thirdly, I describe more modern attacks, in particular horizontal attacks, how they work and what are their limitations. Subsequently, we concentrate on the state-of-art attacks including both supervised approaches (like Template and Deep Learning Attacks) and unsupervised ones (based either on clustering or Deep Learning). All concepts are given in historical context and illustrated by practical examples. Finally, I am going to shortly talk about my current (and future) research on SCA.

• Georg Fuchsbauer: The security of Mimblewimble, a scalable cryptocurrency
  TU Wien, Austria

  Abstract:

  Mimblewimble is a payment protocol that underlies several cryptocurrencies and is now also supported by Litecoin. Besides offering privacy by design, it improves on scalability: while in Bitcoin every transaction must be stored forever, in Mimblewimble only the "unspent transaction outputs", which represent the current state of the system, must be kept. In joint work with Michele Orrù and Yannick Seurin, we have formally shown the security of Mimblewimble (EUROCRYPT'19), as well as that of a recent extension (ia.cr/2022/265).

• Qian Guo: Side-channel-assisted key-recovery chosen-ciphertext attacks on several NIST PQC KEMs
  Lund University, Sweden

  Abstract:

  In this talk, we survey the recent results on side-channel-assisted key-recovery chosen-ciphertext attacks (CCAs) on several candidates for Public Key Encryption (PKE) or Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) in the NIST post-quantum cryptography standardization process. Specially, we discuss the general attack model and show timing attacks against implementations of FrodoKEM, HQC, and BIKE using leakages from the Fujisaki-Okamoto transform. We also discuss power/EM attacks on ARM Cortex-M4 implementations of Kyber and Saber and on software/hardware implementations of the code-based finalist Classic McEliece. Some attack variants are difficult to thwart since a limited number of bits of information need to recover from a long leakage trace.

• Kamil Kluczniak: Recent Advances in Fully Homomorphic Encryption
  CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Germany

  Abstract:

  A fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) scheme allows a client to encrypt and delegate its data to a server that performs computation on the encrypted data, returning the result, which the client can then decrypt. While FHE gives confidentiality to clients' data, it does not protect the server's input and computation. Nevertheless, FHE schemes are still helpful in building protocols that reduce communication complexity, as FHE ciphertext's size should be independent of the size of the computation performed on them. We can further extend FHE by a property called circuit privacy, which guarantees that the result of computing on ciphertexts reveals no information on the computed function and the inputs of the server. Thereby, circuit private FHE gives rise to round optimal and communication efficient secure two-party computation protocols. Unfortunately, despite significant efforts and much work put into the efficiency and practical implementations of FHE schemes, very little has been done to provide useful and practical FHE supporting circuit privacy. In this work, we address this gap and design the first randomized bootstrapping algorithm whose single invocation sanitizes a ciphertext and, consequently, servers as a tool to provide circuit privacy. We can use our algorithms to finalize homomorphic computation. We give an extensive analysis, propose parameters and implement our schemes in C++. Depending on the setting, it takes only 2-3 seconds to sanitize a ciphertext for binary and non-binary plaintexts. The time is only 2x the time to run a non-sanitized bootstrapping. Crucially, we do not need to increase the parameters significantly to perform computation before or after the sanitization takes place, which is in sharp contrast to the noise flooding technique. As an example application, we show a simple private set intersection (PSI) protocol in which server online computation and communication time are independent of the server set size. We regard the PSI protocol as a side contribution of independent interest as its the first FHE-based PSI protocol with such efficient properties.

Conference Chairs

• Karol Nemoga - Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovakia
• Pavol Zajac - Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia

Program committee

• László Csirmaz - UTIA, Czech Republic, and Renyi Institute, Hungary
• Andrej Dujella - University of Zagreb, Croatia
• Peter Gaži - IOHK Research, Austria
• Otokar Grošek - Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia
• Maciej Grześkowiak - Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland
• Jan Hajny - Brno University of Technology, Czechia
• Tamás Herendi – University of Debrecen, Hungary
• Clemens Heuberger - Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
• Andrea Huszti - University of Debrecen, Hungary
• Miroslaw Kutylowski - Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Poland
• Vashek Matyáš - Masaryk University, Czechia
• Jacek Pomykała - University of Warsaw, Poland
• Håvard Raddum - Simula UiB, Norway
• Stefan Rass - Johannes Kepler University Linz, and Universitaet Klagenfurt, Austria
• Vincent Rijmen - KU Leuven, Belgium
• Martin Stanek - Comenius University, Slovakia
• Rainer Steinwandt - The University of Alabama in Huntsville, USA
• Damian Vizár - CSEM, Switzerland
• Michał Wroński - Military University of Technology, Poland

Conference chairs/Local organizers

• Karol Nemoga - Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovakia
• Pavol Zajac - Slovak University of Technology, Slovakia

Conference support team

• Roderik Ploszek - Slovak University of Technology, Slovakia
• Pavol Marák - Slovak University of Technology, Slovakia
• Tomáš Fabšič - Slovak University of Technology, Slovakia
• Miloslav Smičík - Slovak University of Technology, Slovakia
• Peter Sýs - Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovakia