A new 3-year R&D project SCANDIUM, which runs at PACY Lab and is funded by ZITiS (Central Office for Information Technology in the Security Sector) kicked-off last month. The project explores methods to improve cooperation between German law-enforcement agencies that face complex and resource-intensive investigative tasks. Although these agencies are willing to collaborate, strict regulations prevent them from sharing sensitive information directly. As a result, coordination must be achieved in a way that respects confidentiality while still enabling efficient use of limited resources. In this project PACY Lab works with ZITiS on the design of secure multi-party computation protocols aiming to reduce redundant work across the agencies by detecting overlaps in large confidential datasets without revealing their contents. By ensuring that efforts are not duplicated, the approach aims to optimize the allocation of resources and shorten the overall time required to complete such investigative processes.
Prof. Mark Manulis recently attended the 20th ACM ASIACCS 2025 conference, held from 25 to 29 August 2025 in Hanoi, Vietnam. At this premier security event, he presented a research paper entitled “Fast SNARK‑based Non‑Interactive Distributed Verifiable Random Function with Ethereum Compatibility”, co‑authored with Jia Liu—then at Enya Labs, now with Input Output (IOHK). ACM ASIACCS, organized by ACM SIGSAC, is a leading forum for cutting-edge breakthroughs in computer and communications security. Their paper tackles a fundamental challenge in decentralized systems—secure, efficient randomness generation—by introducing the most efficient direct construction of a non‑interactive distributed verifiable random function (NI‑DVRF) that integrates seamlessly with Ethereum. This scheme innovatively combines pairing‑based cryptography, secret sharing, SNARKs, and BLS signatures, and is anchored in formal security proofs under standard assumptions in the random oracle model. Demonstrating both theoretical depth and practical viability, the team implemented highly optimized versions in Rust and Solidity, with deployment under consideration on Boba Network’s layer‑2 DRB service. Their experimental evaluation underscores strong performance and scalability, reinforcing the solution’s potential for real‑world blockchain adoption.
A strong start of the year for the PACY Lab with "FABS: Fast Attribute-based Signatures" being accepted to appear at the flagship conference USENIX Security 2026. This paper is a result of collaboration with researchers from Surrey Centre for Cyber Security and our contribution to the EU Horizon project PiQASO and dtech.bw project LIONS. Attribute-based signatures (ABS) allows user to obtain secret signing keys associated either with attributes or policies and use them to digitally sign messages. In so-called SP-ABS schemes, attributes are associated with signing keys and the resulting signatures can be verified, confirming that the signer possesses sufficient attributes satisfying some access policy without leaking attribute values. In KP-ABS schemes, signing keys are associated with access policies and the resulting signatures can only be verified using attributes satisfying those policies. The paper features the so-far fastest constructions and implementations of SP-ABS and KP-ABS schemes supporting expressive access policies based on monotone span programmes (MSP).
Jerome Nguyen recently attended the FHE 2026 conference, held on March 8 in Taipei, where he gave a talk about his recent work “GG-GSW: Chosen-Ciphertext Secure Leveled FHE From Gadget Trapdoors". The paper develops a new method for fully homomorphic encryption that remains secure even against active attackers, based on the widely trusted Learning with Errors (LWE) problem. Unlike previous approaches, active security isobtained without relying on costly and complex auxiliary zero-knowledge proofs (called SNARKs) and instead uses a more direct method to detect potentially malicious queries. The result is a more efficient and practical levelled FHE scheme that keeps the core functionality of earlier designs while improving security. A preprint of the paper can be found at https://ia.cr/2026/316.
Cooperation with ZITiS on the new project SCANDIUM
