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

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...

There is a lot to be appreciated about someone with an actual humanities education and a capacity to think writing about AGI. www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/on-inco... by @eruditorumpress.com

And now we are famous: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/w... - congratulations to all colleagues who made the NYT (both through quotes, by playing a role, or by being on this picture)

Two stories from King's College London: 1/ A student is at risk of losing their visa over their Palestine activism www.cage.ngo/articles/leg... 2/ Equality, Diversity and Inclusion removed from job ads: www.timeshighereducation.com/news/pressur... Does that remind you of anything?

I was today's years old when I realised that "we" give developers an object called the Advanced Encryption Standard which is not an encryption algorithm (but a pseudorandom permutation) and then we are shocked when we encounter yet another ECB mode in the wild. 🙃

Discord user IDs getting leaked is the entirely predictable consequence of requiring platforms to do age verification. That data never goes away, it spreads. In this case, into appeals in a breached customer support database. And predictably, it can get worse. www.404media.co/the-discord-...

So, Discord implemented true ID age verification and this turned into a privacy disaster, am I reading this right? discord.com/press-releas...

Internship Position on the Lattice Estimator martinralbrecht.wordpress.com/2025/08/27/i...

New ethnographic work with @rikkebjerg.bsky.social and @malb.bsky.social on information security in the UK climate movement -- accepted and presented recently at USENIX Security ’25 in Seattle 🌱 www.usenix.org/conference/u...

We are recruiting for at Postdoc Position in Lattice-Based Cryptography at King's College London martinralbrecht.wordpress.com/2025/08/24/p...

11 Sep UK Crypto Day in Manchester: uk-crypto-day.github.io/2025/09/11/u... Together with @rikkebjerg.bsky.social I'll be talking about our upcoming work with @bedow.bsky.social and Simone Colombo: At-Compromise Security: The Case for Alert Blindness

Slides of my talk titled "Lattices give us KEMs and FHE, but where are the efficient lattice PETs? -- By Example of (Verifiable) Oblivious PRFs" given at spiqe-workshop.github.io are here: github.com/malb/talks/b... Thanks @kennyog.bsky.social and @jurajsomorovsky.bsky.social for inviting me.

Wedges, oil, and vinegar – An analysis of UOV in characteristic 2 (Lars Ran) ia.cr/2025/1143

An out-of-schedule update to my quantum landscape chart: sam-jaques.appspot.com/quantum_land..., prompted by @craiggidney.bsky.social 's new paper: arxiv.org/abs/2505.15917. A startling jump (20x) in how easy quantum factoring can be! Also: much improved web design!

New blog post on our (with @rikkebjerg.bsky.social and @mikaelabrough.bsky.social) USENIX'25 paper "On the Virtues of Information Security in the UK Climate Movement" where I end up reflecting on writing this, for me, unusual work. martinralbrecht.wordpress.com/2025/06/14/o...

Eamonn and I received a Zama Cryptanalysis Grant to help with the lattice estimator github.com/malb/lattice.... We hope to hire interns to work on the estimator over two periods over the next 18 months. Zama are still taking applications for this grant, see here: www.zama.ai/post/announc...

10 June: Jean-François Blanchette Talk and Discussion on "Burdens of Proof" in London martinralbrecht.wordpress.com/2025/04/15/1...

Ooh -- also: The "More is Less" paper (eprint.iacr.org/2017/713 ) pointed out this group membership issue with WhatsApp in 2017 -- almost 8 years ago!

Dan wrote a nice thread about our work on WhatsApp presented at Eurocrypt earlier today and discussed in @dangoodin.bsky.social's article linked below.

... who have to constantly monitor the UI for changes to the member list. And it is a burden that is unnecessary: Signal deploys cryptographic control of group membership at scale, for example. Thanks @dangoodin.bsky.social for your coverage of our work in this piece: arstechnica.com/security/202...

How does WhatsApp implement encrypted group chats? And are they secure? @malb.bsky.social, @bedow.bsky.social and myself were keen to figure this out. After two years of reverse-engineering, analysis and a few too many proofs, I presented our work at Eurocrypt earlier today. So, what did we learn?

This is cool heimberger.xyz/oprfs.html

Just about ready to set off to Madrid for #eurocrypt 2025, where I’ll have the great honour of giving the 2025 IACR Distinguished Lecture on Tuesday afternoon. #iacr #cryptography

Formal Analysis of Multi-Device Group Messaging in WhatsApp (Martin R. Albrecht, Benjamin Dowling, Daniel Jones) ia.cr/2025/794

Okay, this is fun github.com/Jacksaur/Gor... I like the DOOM one.

We teach a broad range of political perspectives here at Harvard... ranging from those of *checks notes*... center-right military officials to... *squints* ultra-right market absolutists, and you should be more grateful for that.

The idea that you can just “teach computer science” and be apolitical is a beautiful dream that expired in the 2000s, at the latest. Computer science has re-organized every facet of our society: it is inherently political. Instead of taking this idea seriously, we ran from it. Now we live in hell.

Day two of the strike, and we've ben getting a lot of questions from students about the action. What's it for, why are we doing it now, and how can they help. So let's run through some Strike Questions! 🧵

If someone is up for helping with some bitrot in FPLLL, FPyLLL and G6K, that'd be nice. - github.com/fplll/fplll/... - github.com/fplll/fplll/... - github.com/fplll/fpylll...

NCSC-née-GCHQ have a whitepaper on FHE, PIR, MPC, ZK, PSI and ABE out: www.ncsc.gov.uk/whitepaper/a...

There’s just so much shady shit in this story, but this really sticks out. Folks in NLRB’s IT unit were so freaked out by what they saw DOGE doing that they wanted to notify the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Then this happened:

10 June: Jean-François Blanchette Talk and Discussion on "Burdens of Proof" in London martinralbrecht.wordpress.com/2025/04/15/1...

This long read is quite something: www.npr.org/2025/04/15/n...

pypi.org/project/tari... !

Meanwhile, S&P is held in a month in San Francisco and there seems to be no plan to switch to hybrid. We've entered the reign of the arbitrary, *everybody* is affected.

On digital currencies and the great power conflict between the US and the EU: "The battle for the global payments system is under way" www.ft.com/content/40f6... (I know the FT is paywalled, sorry about that!)

When our union is in dispute and when we take action we ask for solidarity from across the movement and our communities because we are all connected in struggle. So it matters that we also practice solidarity with sibling unions in dispute and when taking action. Solidarity @uniteucu.bsky.social

Oh fun! "Breaking and Fixing Content-Defined Chunking" uses G6K in one of the attacks: worlds colliding, lattice reduction in the wild something something. eprint.iacr.org/2025/558 github.com/fplll/g6k

Actual cryptographers have studied this. Here js their peer-reviewed research: mtpsym.github.io eprint.iacr.org/2022/595 eprint.iacr.org/2025/451

I really appreciate all the hard work done by the #realworldcrypto steering committee and to AWS for stepping up to organise in Seattle in 2027, but I’m going to come out and say it: with the US as it now is, I think this choice of location is a mistake.

"Rethinking Security from the Ground Up" an interview with @rikkebjerg.bsky.social (based in @isg-rhul.bsky.social) in @themarkup.org It's a good interview, go read it. themarkup.org/hello-world/...

Grateful to @iacrcrypto.bsky.social for acting quickly to address serious concerns from the community.

Update on crypto.iacr.org/2025/

Given problems with scientists entering the USA perhaps moving Crypto from Santa Barbara would be the first step to think about.... www.lemonde.fr/internationa...

*Friends don’t let friends deploy a cryptographic protocol without a formal cryptographic analysis* martinralbrecht.wordpress.com/2025/03/16/a... @kennyog.bsky.social @eyalr0.bsky.social @lenka.sh

Some might wonder: why do we spend time analysing such a beastly protocol? Aren’t we just giving undeserved credence to Telegram’s ugly cryptography? Folks, that ship sailed a long time ago. Telegram has a billion users and so we need to understand what security it’s crypto offers.

It’s finally out - our 107-page analysis of key exchange in Telegram in which we proved (after massive effort) that the bespoke protocol is ok, if you’re willing to make some uncomfy assumptions on the home-grown KDF. With @malb.bsky.social, @eyalr0.bsky.social, Lenka Mareková and Igors Stepanovs.

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...

Join our Applied Crypto group at FAU in Nürnberg as a PhD student or spread the word: we're hiring. Our work covers many topics in real-world crypto, especially provable security and privacy of modern messaging protocols 🔐✉️ www.jobs.fau.de/jobs/7-phd-p...