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AWS Cryptography call for proposals - Fall 2025

Setting the standard for cryptography at Amazon.

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About this CFP

Amazon’s mission is to provide customers with the world’s most secure computing environment. We are the stewards of cryptography engineering within Amazon, and we set the standard for the use and implementation of such technologies across the organization. Cryptography builds and maintains customer trust by protecting users’ applications and data in use, in transit, and at rest.

We seek proposals in these areas:

Primitives and protocols

  • Formal proof of security properties for cryptographic primitives.
  • Practical optimizations for cryptographic transport protocols.
  • Cryptanalysis of standard algorithms and protocols.
  • Wide-block ciphers and new efficient symmetric encryption modes based on existing primitives.
  • MPC-friendly symmetric primitives.
  • Novel cryptographic constructions using quantum resistant primitives, including threshold signatures and oblivious pseudo-random functions.

Implementation, verification, and open source

  • Formal, static verification of open source cryptographic software, including verification of freedom from side-channel attacks.
  • Verified optimization of cryptographic code, particularly for 64-bit x86, Armv8.x, and Armv9.x ISAs and their associated micro-architectures.
  • Hardware acceleration of FHE and MPC libraries.
  • Verification of randomized algorithms.

Theory and novel applications

  • Fundamental research of the feasibility of a cryptographically-relevant quantum computer.
  • Addressing adversarial behavior in the AI space, including watermarking and provenance mechanisms for AI-generated content.
  • characterization of the privacy guarantees enforced by various differential privacy budget regimes when applied to specific classes of ML attacks.
  • Improved practical FHE bootstrapping algorithms for cloud environments.
  • Compilers and development tools for FHE and MPC.
  • Formal specification and implementation of a production-quality math library for FHE.
  • Pseudo-random correlation generators and the implementation.
  • Architectures and protocols for cloud-based collaboration of multiple organizations.

Timeline

Submission period: October 1 — November 12, 2025 (11:59PM Pacific Time).
Decision letters will be sent out in March 2026.

Award details

Selected Principal Investigators (PIs) may receive the following:

  • Unrestricted funds, up to $80,000 USD.
  • AWS Promotional Credits, up to $40,000 USD.
  • Training resources, including AWS tutorials and hands-on sessions with Amazon scientists and engineers.

Awards are structured as one-time unrestricted gifts. The budget should include a list of expected costs specified in USD, and should not include administrative overhead costs. The final award amount will be determined by the awards panel.

Eligibility requirements

Please refer to the ARA program rules on the rules and eligibility page.

Proposal requirements

Proposals should be prepared according to the proposal template. Proposals should answer the following questions:

  1. Does your work target theory or application? Please provide information about your specific domain.
  2. What are the current applications of your work?
  3. What are potential applications of your work to Amazon?
  4. What assumptions are made by your work? What are issues that may invalidate the trustworthiness of results?
  5. If your work involves the development and maintenance of a tool:
    1. Under what license is your tool released?
    2. What training and tutorial material is available?
    3. Is your tool actively maintained (commits within last 3 months)? How many active contributors does your project have?

Selection criteria

ARA funding decisions will be based on potential impact to Amazon and the development of the scientific community in cryptography. Amazon's commitment to developing the scientific community includes increasing the number of students working on cryptography and at the undergraduate and graduate levels. We are also committed to increasing the diversity of the cryptographic community at all levels. We particularly welcome proposals that further these goals.

Expectations from recipients

To the extent deemed reasonable, award recipients may acknowledge support from ARA (e.g., (“Research reported in this [publication/press release] was supported by an Amazon Research Award, [Cycle /Year].“). Award recipients will inform ARA of publications, presentations, code and data releases, blogs/social media posts, and other speaking engagements referencing the results of the supported research or the Award. Award recipients are expected to provide updates and feedback to ARA via surveys or reports on the status of their research. Award recipients will have an opportunity to work with ARA on an informational statement about the awarded project that may be used to generate visibility for their institutions and ARA.

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