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About

About

I am a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science in the Faculty of Science of the University of Porto (DCC-FCUP) and a researcher at HASLab/INESC TEC. My research interests lie in Cryptography and Information Security and its intersection with Program Verification.

I hold a Ph.D. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the Newcastle University, an M.Sc. from the same University, and a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto. In the past I have been a visiting researcher at the University of Bristol, IT Porto and École Normale Supérieure.

I have been working on the development of high-assurance cryptographic implementations for the last 10 years, aiming to bridge the gap between theoretical security and real-world security. I am particularly interested in provable security and its interplay with the formal verification of cryptographic proofs and cryptographic software implementations.

For information on my research, projects and publications, please see my page at HASLab.

For information on my teaching activities, please see my institutional page at FCUP.

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Details

  • Name

    Manuel Barbosa
  • Since

    01st November 2011
007
Publications

2024

Bare PAKE: Universally Composable Key Exchange from Just Passwords

Authors
Barbosa, M; Gellert, K; Hesse, J; Jarecki, S;

Publication
ADVANCES IN CRYPTOLOGY - CRYPTO 2024, PT II

Abstract
In the past three decades, an impressive body of knowledge has been built around secure and private password authentication. In particular, secure password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE) protocols require only minimal overhead over a classical Diffie-Hellman key exchange. PAKEs are also known to fulfill strong composable security guarantees that capture many password-specific concerns such as password correlations or password mistyping, to name only a few. However, to enjoy both round-optimality and strong security, applications of PAKE protocols must provide unique session and participant identifiers. If such identifiers are not readily available, they must be agreed upon at the cost of additional communication flows, a fact which has been met with incomprehension among practitioners, and which hindered the adoption of provably secure password authentication in practice. In this work, we resolve this issue by proposing a new paradigm for truly password-only yet securely composable PAKE, called bare PAKE. We formally prove that two prominent PAKE protocols, namely CPace and EKE, can be cast as bare PAKEs and hence do not require pre-agreement of anything else than a password. Our bare PAKE modeling further allows to investigate a novel reusability property of PAKEs, i.e., whether n(2) pairwise keys can be exchanged from only n messages, just as the Diffie-Hellman non-interactive key exchange can do in a public-key setting. As a side contribution, this add-on property of bare PAKEs leads us to observe that some previous PAKE constructions relied on unnecessarily strong, reusable building blocks. By showing that non-reusable tools suffice for standard PAKE, we open a new path towards round-optimal post-quantum secure password-authenticated key exchange.

2024

C'est très CHIC: A compact password-authenticated key exchange from lattice-based KEM

Authors
Arriaga, A; Barbosa, M; Jarecki, S; Skrobot, M;

Publication
IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch.

Abstract

2024

X-Wing: The Hybrid KEM You've Been Looking For

Authors
Barbosa, M; Connolly, D; Duarte, JD; Kaiser, A; Schwabe, P; Varner, K; Westerbaan, B;

Publication
IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch.

Abstract

2024

Formally Verifying Kyber Episode V: Machine-Checked IND-CCA Security and Correctness of ML-KEM in EasyCrypt

Authors
Almeida, JB; Olmos, SA; Barbosa, M; Barthe, G; Dupressoir, F; Grégoire, B; Laporte, V; Lechenet, JC; Low, C; Oliveira, T; Pacheco, H; Quaresma, M; Schwabe, P; Strub, PY;

Publication
ADVANCES IN CRYPTOLOGY - CRYPTO 2024, PT II

Abstract
We present a formally verified proof of the correctness and IND-CCA security of ML-KEM, the Kyber-based Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) undergoing standardization by NIST. The proof is machine-checked in EasyCrypt and it includes: 1) A formalization of the correctness (decryption failure probability) and IND-CPA security of the Kyber base public-key encryption scheme, following Bos et al. at Euro S&P 2018; 2) A formalization of the relevant variant of the Fujisaki-Okamoto transform in the Random Oracle Model (ROM), which follows closely (but not exactly) Hofheinz, Hovelmanns and Kiltz at TCC 2017; 3) A proof that the IND-CCA security of the ML-KEM specification and its correctness as a KEM follows from the previous results; 4) Two formally verified implementations of ML-KEM written in Jasmin that are provably constant-time, functionally equivalent to the ML-KEM specification and, for this reason, inherit the provable security guarantees established in the previous points. The top-level theorems give self-contained concrete bounds for the correctness and security of ML-KEM down to (a variant of) Module-LWE. We discuss how they are built modularly by leveraging various EasyCrypt features.

2023

Rogue key and impersonation attacks on FIDO2: From theory to practice

Authors
Barbosa, M; Cirne, A; Esquível, L;

Publication
18TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON AVAILABILITY, RELIABILITY & SECURITY, ARES 2023

Abstract
FIDO2 is becoming a defacto standard for passwordless authentication. Using FIDO2 and WebAuthn, web applications can enable users to associate cryptographic credentials to their profiles, and then rely on an external authenticator (e.g., a hardware token plugged into the USB port) to perform strong signature-based authentication when accessing their accounts. The security of FIDO2 has been theoretically validated, but these analyses follow the threat model adopted in the FIDO2 design and explicitly exclude some attack vectors as being out of scope. In this paper we show that two of these attacks, which appear to be folklore in the community, are actually straightforward to launch in practice (user PIN extraction, impersonation and rogue key registration). We demonstrate a deployment over vanilla Linux distributions and commercial FIDO2 authenticators. We discuss the potential impact of our results, which we believe will contribute to the improvement of future versions of the protocol.