I picked them from Crypto 2023, and the list reflects my own interest. Each of them is chosen to represent one topic in cryptography, so there is likely a paper published earlier that is easier to read. You can pick a paper in the following list, an older paper cited by a paper in the list, or you may pick your own from related conferences, here is a list: Crypto, Eurocrypt, Asiacrypt, STOC, FOCS, TCC, ITC.
Proposal (20%): 1 page, due Oct 18 (Wed). Please find your group of at most 2. Please describe the paper and the topic you picked, explain why the topic is interesting, and identify 3-5 references (textbook or published papers) that is potentially useful later. The purpose is to get started early and to let me see if I can help early on.
Presentation (40%): This will be the last 1-2 lectures at the end of semester. The time slot per group is ~20 minutes. Your goal is to make the talk comprehensible to other students, so that every student will grade all other groups.
Report (40%): Please write the summary of your research in 2-5 pages. I will read and grade your report.
(Potential) Final project papers
When you look for references: UVA library has online access to many publications, and most cryptographers post online versions of their publication.
How to Recover a Secret with O(n) Additions
Benny Applebaum, Oded Nir, Benny Pinkas. https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/838.pdf
Non-interactive Universal Arguments
Nir Bitansky, Omer Paneth, Dana Shamir, Tomer Solomon. https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/458.pdf
Universal arguments and their applications
Boaz Barak and Oded Goldreich. SIAM J. Comput., 38(5):1661–1694, 2008. https://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~oded/R6/ua.pdf
Arithmetic Sketching
Dan Boneh, Elette Boyle, Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, Niv Gilboa, Yuval Ishai. https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1012.pdf
Publicly-Verifiable Deletion via Target-Collapsing Functions
James Bartusek, Dakshita Khurana, Alexander Poremba. https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/370.pdf
Cryptography with Certified Deletion
James Bartusek, Dakshita Khurana. https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1178.pdf
How to Use (Plain) Witness Encryption: Registered ABE, Flexible Broadcast, and More
Cody Freitag, Brent Waters, David J. Wu. https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/812.pdf
The Query-Complexity of Preprocessing Attacks
Ashrujit Ghoshal, Stefano Tessaro. https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/856.pdf
The Pseudorandom Oracle Model and Ideal Obfuscation
Aayush Jain, Huijia Lin, Ji Luo, Daniel Wichs. https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1204.pdf
Cryptography with Weights: MPC, Encryption and Signatures
Sanjam Garg, Abhishek Jain, Pratyay Mukherjee, Rohit Sinha, Mingyuan Wang, Yinuo Zhang. https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1632.pdf
A Note on Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge from CDH
Geoffroy Couteau, Abhishek Jain, Zhengzhong Jin, Willy Quach. https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/970.pdf
One-way Functions and the Hardness of (Probabilistic) Time-Bounded Kolmogorov Complexity w.r.t. Samplable Distributions
Yanyi Liu, Rafael Pass. https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1086.pdf
Lattice-Based Succinct Arguments for NP with Polylogarithmic-Time Verification
Jonathan Bootle, Alessandro Chiesa, Katerina Sotiraki. https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/930.pdf