Bit of a last-minute announcement: school on isogenies 9 - 13 Feb at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) groups.oist.jp/tsvp/event/s... Registration deadline is tomorrow (15 Jan).

Social Foundations of Cryptography: Autumn School London, UK | 15 to 17 September 2026 social-foundations-of-cryptography.gitlab.io/school

So a question for people working on subways? Construction? My daughter wants to know what these scribbles on the wall of the subway tunnel shortly before Essen Main Station, approaching from the south might mean.

if you want a long read that involves udders, a hot air balloon, and some extremely dubious data on egg prices, the story I’ve been working on for the last few months where I tried to single-handedly take on every government function myself is now online! www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

The Real World Crypto 2026 program is now online: rwc.iacr.org/2026/program... We look forward to seeing many of you!

Are you interested in programming languages research and mentoring up and coming PL researchers? Then you should fill out the self-nomination form for the PLDI'26 Student Research Competition's PC: forms.gle/KSacbLEtw1Yw... (Note, you must have a PhD by June 2026 to be a judge)

He's a 10 but only in bits of security

Come work with us! Lecturer (≅ Assistant Professor/Juniorprofessor/Maître de conférences) in Cryptography at King’s College London martinralbrecht.wordpress.com/2026/01/05/l...

For those of you keeping score at home, I’ve been informed by Alessandra that it’s a classic spaghetti with oil and cheese! Because this account right here really gets to the bottom of the important topics.

Folks, she brought a whole plate of spaghetti to the broadcast center to do her headshot. She then houses that spaghetti. Mattia sips on an espresso during his. Truly the heroes we need during these times.

Deadline is January 7. Still a few days left to apply...

cryptographers are people too, they lose their keys and everything

Advice I now give to grad students and postdocs in the sciences: Don’t just try to meet and impress senior scientists. They’ll retire soon. Get to know your fellow students - make friends where possible, be colleagues at least. These are the people you’ll be sharing the field with for decades.

@rwc.iacr.org accepted talks are out.... rwc.iacr.org/2026/accepte... I am not sure how they are going to fit them all into three days

Your quarterly reminder to submit a paper to Communications in Cryptology... cic.iacr.org It is Diamond Open Access (readers and authors do not pay) and it contains all your new cool cryptographic research. Next deadline for submission is Feb 2nd.

Come work with Peter Scholl @schollster.bsky.social and me in Aarhus!

Cryptography shows that AI filters will never work.... www.quantamagazine.org/cryptographe... Nice application of crypto to AI, and shows that AI has inherent limitations.

Interested in the security of MPC implementations? Peter Scholl (@schollster.bsky.social) and I are looking for research interns to study the theory/practice gap for MPC. We can host multiple interns in Aarhus for the summer 2026. More information: mpcinthewild.github.io Help us spread the word!

I had almost forgotten about Time AI

The International Association for Cryptologic Research has used heliosvoting.org – my online voting system – for a number of years. This year, a trustee lost their secret key. The election has to be re-run. Below, a few thoughts that didn't fit in the NYT piece. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/w...

Question for the dog people: Is there any way to communicate to otherwise well-behaved dogs that you want them to go away?

AV team knows the struggle

Every time I see physical attacks on TEEs, I wish someone would put out a position paper on @hdevalence.bsky.social 's "guy with a glock" model x.com/hdevalence/s...

Program verification methods aim to be scalable (able to reason about large programs), automatic (require little human input), and precise (reason about complex properties). Yet no method does all three. In fact, they form a "trilemma". See this very short post: verse.systems/blog/post/20...

What is Cryptography Hiding from Itself? (Diego F. Aranha, Nikolas Melissaris) ia.cr/2025/1951

How dominant is LaTeX in computer science? Very. It turns out that among the 1895 papers uploaded to eprint.iacr.org this year, it looks like 3 were produced from typst, 10 were produced from Microsoft Word, and three of indeterminate origin. The rest were various flavors of LaTeX.

Last chance to (self-) nominate for USENIX Security'26 Artifact Evaluation Committee! You should expect a low load of ~1 artifact for functionality/reproducibility assessments per cycle (max 3 for the whole year). Please support Open Science and fill the form by Oct 17: forms.gle/WoYRX4govNY1... 🚀

You are an Early Career Researcher in #cybersec? Here is an opportunity: The AEC chairs of @USENIXSecurity '26 are looking for (self)nominations for the Artifact Evaluation Committee. Deadline: October 17th, 2025, so sign up soon! @chwress.bsky.social, @kumarde.bsky.social, @aurore-fass.bsky.social

Who Verifies the Verifiers? Lessons Learned From Formally Verified Line-Point Zero-Knowledge (Sabine Oechsner, Vitor Pereira, Peter Scholl) ia.cr/2025/1835

Volume 2 Issue 3 of Communications in Cryptology is now available.... cic.iacr.org/i/2/3

New paper with Vitor Pereira and Peter Scholl (@schollster.bsky.social)! We found flaws in a supposedly formally verified security proof of LPZK, leading to attacks on soundness and zk. The culprit: a mismatch between definitions in their code and the original LPZK papers. cic.iacr.org/p/2/3/24

this is the photo in the "absurdity" article on Danish Wikipedia ("A rabbit with a waffle. On the head")

When you think about it, we really should call "Tesla autopilot" vibe driving

Apparently the threshold for the auto-moderator to tag an entire account as spam is currently 15 image posts within 2 minutes. Which cryptography conference submission deadline just passed? 😅

Interesting approach from the PL community to deal with reviewing an unexpectedly high number of submissions...

More than 500 researchers have signed an open letter against the dangerous EU proposal on chat control. The proposal remains ineffective, undoes decades of results in E2E encryption, and threatens the privacy of half a billion citizens. csa-scientist-open-letter.org/Sep2025

How Hard Can It Be to Formalize a Proof? Lessons from Formalizing CryptoBox Three Times in EasyCrypt (François Dupressoir, Andreas Hülsing, Cameron Low, Matthias Meijers, Charlotte Mylog, Sabine Oechsner) ia.cr/2025/1569

Turns out that discuss.iacr.org is getting some interesting participation in response to the survey that was put out. If you received an invitation, you should consider joining just to read along.

test test test

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:

The Call for Contributed Talks is now open for RWC 2026! And the deadline for submissions is now Oct. 10, 2025. rwc.iacr.org/2026/contrib...

Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog (Peter Gutmann, Stephan Neuhaus) ia.cr/2025/1237

Please share: We are looking for a new PhD student for the exciting project “Foundations of secure resource sharing” – read more here: phd.nat.au.dk/for-applican...

And for For PhD & advanced MSc students! 🌍 Stipends available for students worldwide — thanks to our sponsors! 📋 Apply for stipends here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... 🖼️ Consider presenting your work in the Latincrypt poster session! 🔗 More info: ascrypto.org/2025/

Come to the ASCrypto school, affiliated with Latincrypt2025! 🗓️ Sept 29–30 | Medellín, Colombia 👨‍🏫 Learn 𝐦𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐧 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐬 from top experts 💥 2 days, 3 modules: IVC, STARKs, MPC 👥 With Benedikt Bünz, Sophia Yakoubov, Alan Szepieniec Organised by the amazing Arantxa Zapico and Javier Verbel.

The deadline has been extended to July 4! plas25.github.io

Super excited that CSF 2025 invited me as one of their keynote speakers! I got to talk about the tension between theory and practice when studying the security of MPC protocols. (Thanks to @owenarden.bsky.social for the photo!)

Reminder to apply to be part of the artifact evaluation committee of NDSS'26! And share with your colleagues :) We'll likely close this form around the end of next week.