The EU Parliament has published a new proposal for Chat Control to mass-surveil all digital communication in Europe. The proposal is ineffective, weakens secure communication, and violates basic human privacy. This must be stopped immediately. #ChatControl csa-scientist-open-letter.org/Sep2025

Really happy to have Jens Groth visiting us in Tartu and giving a seminar on ZK, zkVMs, and AI on Tuesday

This is some mind-blowing stuff :o

Springer just sent an "Urgent" email that many authors from Crypto 2025 (all from ZK community) have broken references provided as "?" in their camera-ready version:

Our paper with Roberto Parisella and Maiara Bollauf was accepted to CiC. We extend DL <=> CDH reduction by den Boer and Maurer. In particular, we show that in BLS12-381 n-PDL (Power DL) is equivalent to n-Diffie-Hellman exponent assumption.

"Trump scraps Biden software security, AI, post-quantum encryption efforts in new executive order" by @ericjgeller.com www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/trump-c... (updated EO 14144 text using Gemini 2.5 Pro here: docs.google.com/document/d/1... )

New accepted paper at Crypto 2025: "On Knowledge-Soundness of Plonk in ROM from Falsifiable Assumptions" (Helger Lipmaa, Roberto Parisella, Janno Siim), with ex-students Roberto and @jannosiim.bsky.social (Janno is also now a colleague)

In other news, Google is deploying age/ID verification based on ZK proofs. blog.google/products/goo...

Europe's most famous technology law, the GDPR, is next on the hit list as the EU pushes ahead with its regulatory killing spree to slash laws it reckons are weighing down its businesses.

Join us in Tartu to work on SNARKs and ZK proofs. 👇 We intend to build a strong ZK research group here + I think it's a really cool place to live and work: virtualtour.ut.ee/en/84-univer...

Just doing some reading about the design of cryptographic protocols.

Our group in Tartu (me and @jannosiim.bsky.social and some PhD students) have additional openings for a postdoc and a PhD student; see crypto.cs.ut.ee/Main/OpenPos... (iacr.org/jobs link will hopefully be up in a few days). Apply by email to me

In Sofia

The list of accepted talks for ProTeCS 2025 is now online. We are looking forward to exciting talks about cryptographic proofs and proof techniques. Thanks to everyone who submitted a proposal! protecs-workshop.gitlab.io/accepted

Excited to read this :)

We have extended the submission deadline for the International Workshop on Foundations and Applications of Privacy-Enhancing Cryptography (PrivCrypt) by two weeks to April 4, 2025, AoE. Please help spread the word and consider submitting your work to join us in Munich in Summer 😎

www.sesame.com/research/cro... I forgot after one minute that I'm not talking to a human. I guess the movie "Her" is the reality now

Together with @kennyog.bsky.social we're organising a meeting at Eurocrypt to discuss how the, let's say, "dramatically changing political landscape" affects cryptography and our community, both domestically in some countries but also internationally eurocrypt.iacr.org/2025/communi...

16th International Conference on Cryptology AFRICACRYPT 2025 July 21-23, 2025 – Rabat, Morocco 🇲🇦 Extended submission deadline in 1 week: africacrypt2025.sciencesconf.org Submit your best results ! See you in Rabat 🇲🇦 in July 2025.

Because of new tariffs, submissions to crypto with a non US author have a 20% reduction to their page limit.

Today, I started as a crypto lecturer at the University of Tartu. A new life begins🙂

Really cool result following some of the ideas of our EC24 paper with @helger.bsky.social and Roberto

I wonder if we can attack more examples where (1) circuits are adaptively chosen by the adversary, and (2) security proof is in the ROM. It always felt like playing with fire (because ROM does not model potential circuit dependence on the hash function), and this work nicely confirms the concern.

The most unlikely mashup

Digital signatures (and some strange cybercrime?) predicted in 1925 ... sort of

Here are some of the biggest breakthroughs in math this year 🧵

Excited to share our new work, Scribe! Scribe is a new low-memory SNARK that is able to prove arbitrarily-large circuits while using minimal memory. Joint work with my excellent student coauthors Anubhav, Tushar, Karan, and Steve. (1/4) Link: eprint.iacr.org/2024/1970

if someone tells you “succinct proofs are too short to leak information about the witness”, please send them this. The ZK property is not just a cool acronym. baincapitalcrypto.com/chosen-insta... This was also the theme of the "Zeitgeist" puzzle at ZK Hack 5!

Overleaf is down. Me:

The realization that I've been relying too much on Overleaf. 😐

Congrats to the winners of the 2024 #IACR Test-of-Time Award for #Asiacrypt: "Fiat-Shamir with aborts: Applications to lattice and factoring-based signatures", by V. Lyubashevsky and "Efficient public key encryption based on ideal lattices", by D. Stehlé, R. Steinfeld, K. Tanaka and K. Xagawa !

Internet voting in Estonia will be 20 years old in 2025. In 2035, it shall be post-quantum. Here's a next step by Valeh, Calvin, Heleen & Jan at Cybernetica's research institute. Lattice-Based Zero-Knowledge Proofs in Action: Applications to Electronic Voting link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The PCP theorem, a jewel of theoretical computer science, establishes that any NP statement can be assessed by a randomized verifier who only checks a vanishing fraction of the proof (indeed, a constant # of characters!) This has had incredible impact, most notably on how ML reviews are conducted

The pack: go.bsky.app/PsmYwLY

I created a starter pack on Electronic Voting and Election Integrity: go.bsky.app/8fpD4u6 Please suggest more, I'm certainly missing people!