NTT Research CIS Lab Director Wins Second IACR Test-of-Time Award for Paper on Oblivious Transfer
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SUNNYVALE, Calif. ~ NTT Research, Inc., a division of NTT (TYO:9432), has announced that a paper co-authored by Distinguished Scientist and Director of the Cryptography and Information Security (CIS) Lab Brent Waters has won an International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) Test-of-Time (ToT) Award. The paper, "A Framework for Efficient and Composable Oblivious Transfer," was presented at the Crypto 2008 conference.

The IACR Test-of-Time Awards are given annually to papers that were delivered 15 years prior at each of the three IACR general conferences (Eurocrypt, Crypto and Asiacrypt). A five-member IACR committee selects the winners based on a consensus view of a paper's impact on the field. In addition to Waters' paper, 14 other papers co-authored by CIS Lab scientists were accepted for Crypto 2023. Another paper was co-authored by a cryptography researcher with the NTT Social Informatics Laboratories (SIL).

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The Test-of-Time Award winning paper introduced a "dual-mode" cryptosystem framework for Oblivious Transfer protocols using a variety of assumptions. This framework facilitated the realization of "universal composability," which is a general purpose model for cryptographic analysis. This was instrumental in strengthening Oblivious Transfer protocols, which are building blocks for secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC). MPC allows parties to calculate outputs without sharing individual inputs. The paper was also an early adopter of lattice-based Learning with Errors (LWE), which has proven to be quantum resistant.

In addition to Waters' award in 2020 for his Attribute Based Encryption presented at Eurocrypt 2005 conference, this year's Test-of-Time Award winning paper had a breakthrough effect with an enduring influence according to CIS Lab Senior Scientist Hoeteck Wee. He said that around 2008 universal composability was generally regarded as something that would take decades before it could be practically feasible and relevant but this work changed all of that by providing an efficient solution that is simple and elegant. It paved the way towards adoption of universal composability in practical MPC research efforts today and laid foundations for an unified algebraic framework towards number theoretic and lattice based approaches for constructing cryptographic schemes.

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One key technical contribution from this paper was its simple yet novel abstraction called dual mode cryptosystems which is now so ingrained in our cryptographic mindset and toolkit that it is taken for granted as something everyone knows and understands according to Wee.

For Crypto 2023 program, ten scientists from CIS Lab and NTT SIL including two post doctoral fellows co authored 15 papers spanning various categories such as Secret Sharing, Functional Encryption, Obfuscation, MPC – ­Emerging Models and MPC Round Efficiency among others. Hugo Krawczyk from Algorand Foundation delivered IACR Distinguished Lecture while Scott Aaronson from University of Texas Austin & OpenAI gave talk on Neurocryptography during this conference whose proceedings are published by Springer in its Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.
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