You may or may not be aware that at SandboxAQ we have an internship residency programme. Residencies would typically be remote but can be on-site, they can take place year round and last between three to twelve months, full-time or part-time. To take part, you’d need to be a PhD student or postdoc somewhere.
In the interest of advertising our programme, here are two example ideas I’d be interested in.
Add SIS and (overstretched-)NTRU to the Lattice Estimator
The name “lattice estimator” at present is more aspirational than factual. In particular, we cover algorithms for solving LWE but not algorithms for solving SIS or (overstretched) NTRU. Well, we implicitly cover SIS because solving SIS implies solving LWE (and we cost that: the “dual attack”), we don’t have a nice interface to ask “how hard would this SIS instance be”. Adding this would be a nice contribution to the community, given how widely that estimator is used.
OPRFs from Lattices
Our first work on building OPRFs from lattices costs about 2MB of bandwidth if you ignore the zero-knowledge proofs and something like 128GB (yes, GB) if you count them. Since then, proving lattice statements has become a lot cheaper, so a natural project is to reconsider our construction: use newer/smaller proofs, tune the parameters, prove it in a nicer game-based model or in UC. To give you a taste of what is possible: This work building a non-interactive key-exchange (NIKE) has to solve essentially the same problem (noise drowning + ZK proofs) and achieves smaller parameters.
If you are interested, or have some other ideas, ping me and apply for a PQC resident position.