The paper “Post-Quantum Anonymity of Kyber” by Varun Maram (ETH Zurich) and Keita Xagawa (NTT Social Informatics Laboratories, Japan) won the best paper award at PKC23 this month.
The annual conference is one of the top cryptography conferences and was held this year in Atlanta, where Varun accepted the award on behalf of the team. The paper proves the anonymity of Kyber (a key-encapsulation mechanism selected by NIST in its PQC standardization process), and the (hybrid) PKE schemes derived from it, in a post-quantum setting. The paper also provides an approach to obtain tight IND-CCA security proofs for Kyber with concrete bounds and extends the results to Saber.