Postal voting is a frequently used alternative to on-site voting.Traditionally, its security relies on organizational measures, andvoters have to trust many entities.In the recent years, several schemes have been proposed to addverifiability properties to postal voting, while preserving vote privacy. Postal voting comes with specific constraints. We conduct a systematic analysis of this setting and we identify a list of generic attacks, highlighting that some attacks seem unavoidable. This study is applied to existing systems of the literature. We then propose Vote&Check, a postal voting protocol which provides a high level of security, with a reduced number of authorities. Furthermore, it requires only basic cryptographic primitives, namely hash functions and signatures. The security properties are proven in a symbolic model, with the help of the ProVerif tool.

Coercion-resistance is a security property of electronic voting, often considered as a must-have for high-stake elections. The JCJ voting scheme, proposed in 2005 by Juels, Catalano and Jakobsson, is still the reference paradigm when designing a coercion-resistant protocol. We highlight a weakness in JCJ that is also present in all the systems following its general structure. This comes from the procedure that precedes the tally, where the trustees remove the ballots that should not be counted. This phase leaks more information than necessary, leading to potential threats for the coerced voters. Fixing this leads to the notion of cleansing-hiding, that we apply to form a variant of JCJ that we call CHide. One reason for the problem not being seen before is the fact that the associated formal definition of coercion-resistance was too weak. We therefore propose a definition that takes into account more behaviors such as revoting or the addition of fake ballots by authorities. We then prove that CHide is coercion-resistant for this definition.

We propose an on-site voting system Themis, that aims at improving security when local authorities are not fully trusted. Voters vote thanks to voting sheets as well as smart cards that produce encrypted ballots. Electronic ballots are systematically audited, without compromising privacy. Moreover, the system includes a precise dispute resolution procedure identifying misbehaving parties in most cases.

The Tower variant of the Number Field Sieve (TNFS) is known to be asymptotically the most efficient algorithm to solve the discrete logarithm problem in finite fields of medium characteristics, when the extension degree is composite. A major obstacle to an efficient implementation of TNFS is the collection of algebraic relations, as it happens in dimension greater than 2. This requires the construction of new sieving algorithms which remain efficient as the dimension grows. In this article, we overcome this difficulty by considering a lattice enumeration algorithm which we adapt to this specific context. We also consider a new sieving area, a high-dimensional sphere, whereas previous sieving algorithms for the classical NFS considered an orthotope. Our new sieving technique leads to a much smaller running time, despite the larger dimension of the search space, and even when considering a larger target, as demonstrated by a record computation we performed in a 521-bit finite field \({\mathbb F}_{p^6}\). The target finite field is of the same form than finite fields used in recent zero-knowledge proofs in some blockchains. This is the first reported implementation of TNFS.

The Kalray MPPA-256 processor is based on a recent low-energy manycore architecture. In this article, we investigate its performance in multiprecision arithmetic for number-theoretic applications. We have developed a library for modular arithmetic that takes full advantage of the particularities of this architecture. This is in turn used in an implementation of the ECM, an algorithm for integer factorization using elliptic curves. For parameters corresponding to a cryptanalytic context, our implementation compares well to state-of-the-art implementations on GPU, while using much less energy.

We investigate the security of Diffie-Hellman key exchange as used in popular Internet protocols and find it to be less secure than widely believed. First, we present Logjam, a novel flaw in TLS that lets a man-in-the-middle downgrade connections to "export-grade" Diffie-Hellman. To carry out this attack, we implement the number field sieve discrete log algorithm. After a week-long precomputation for a specified 512-bit group, we can compute arbitrary discrete logs in that group in about a minute. We find that 82% of vulnerable servers use a single 512-bit group, allowing us to compromise connections to 7% of Alexa Top Million HTTPS sites. In response, major browsers are being changed to reject short groups. We go on to consider Diffie-Hellman with 768- and 1024-bit groups. We estimate that even in the 1024-bit case, the computations are plausible given nation-state resources. A small number of fixed or standardized groups are used by millions of servers; performing precomputation for a single 1024-bit group would allow passive eavesdropping on 18% of popular HTTPS sites, and a second group would allow decryption of traffic to 66% of IPsec VPNs and 26% of SSH servers. A close reading of published NSA leaks shows that the agency's attacks on VPNs are consistent with having achieved such a break. We conclude that moving to stronger key exchange methods should be a priority for the Internet community.

The usual algorithm to solve polynomial systems using Gröbner bases consists of two steps: first computing the DRL Gröbner basis using the F5 algorithm then computing the LEX Gröbner basis using a change of ordering algorithm. When the Bézout bound is reached, the bottleneck of the total solving process is the change of ordering step. For 20 years, thanks to the FGLM algorithm the complexity of change of ordering is known to be cubic in the number of solutions of the system to solve.

In this paper, we focus on the relation collection step of the Function Field Sieve (FFS), which is to date the best algorithm known for computing discrete logarithms in small-characteristic finite fields of cryptographic sizes. Denoting such a finite field by Fpn, where p is much smaller than n, the main idea behind this step is to find polynomials of the form a(t)-b(t)x in Fp[t][x] which, when considered as principal ideals in carefully selected function fields, can be factored into products of low-degree prime ideals. Such polynomials are called "relations", and current record-sized discrete-logarithm computations need billions of those. Collecting relations is therefore a crucial and extremely expensive step in FFS, and a practical implementation thereof requires heavy use of cache-aware sieving algorithms, along with efficient polynomial arithmetic over Fp[t]. This paper presents the algorithmic and arithmetic techniques which were put together as part of a new public implementation of FFS, aimed at medium-to record-sized computations.

Schönhage-Strassen's algorithm is one of the best known algorithms for multiplying large integers. Implementing it ef?ciently is of utmost importance, since many other algorithms rely on it as a subroutine. We present here an improved implementation, based on the one distributed within the GMP library. The following ideas and techniques were used or tried: faster arithmetic modulo 2n + 1, improved cache locality, Mersenne transforms, Chinese Remainder Reconstruction, the √2 trick, Harley's and Granlund's tricks, improved tuning.

We study the complexity of computing one or several terms (not necessarily consecutive) in a recurrence with polynomial coefficients. As applications, we improve the best currently known upper bounds for factoring integers deterministically and for computing the Cartier–Manin operator of hyperelliptic curves.

The Schoof-Elkies-Atkin algorithm is the best known algorithm for counting the number of points of an elliptic curve defined over a finite field of large characteristic. Several practical and asymptotical improvements for the phase called eigenvalue computation are proposed.