Well, this seems like a big deal. arxiv.org/abs/2603.087... "This is the first algorithm that can PAC learn even intersections of two halfspaces in time 2^o(n)."

Our group in Tartu (me, @jannosiim , Roberto Parisella etc) have an opening for up to 3 positions (postdoc or PhD) in ZK. See the link below for more information crypto.cs.ut.ee/Main/ZKPosit...

Pkc 2026 paper by @jannosiim.bsky.social (group member)

Our group in Tartu will have several new PhD positions this year. The first one on the web is this (Lattice-based cryptography, supervised by Maiara Bollauf) sites.google.com/view/maiarab...

Consider attending our CASA summer school on cryptography and distributed computing from June 22.-25. in Bochum! Registration is open until March 12. casa.rub.de/en/events/ca...

What a Wonderful World: zkSNARKs in the Algebraic Group Model are Universally Composable (Gaspard Anthoine, Dario Fiore, Mahak Pancholi) ia.cr/2026/399

Cyclo: Lightweight Lattice-based Folding via Partial Range Checks (Albert Garreta, Helger Lipmaa, Urmas Luhaäär, Michał Osadnik) ia.cr/2026/359

Fantastic post by Colin Raffel, "We Are Over-Indexing on Paper Acceptance," drafted in May 2021 (!) but only posted now. The more things change.. Last sentence: "If you want to judge a researcher’s quality, the only meaningful way is to read their papers and judge for yourself."

Second Eurocrypt paper Cyclo: Lightweight Lattice-based Folding via Partial Range Checks (Garreta, Lipmaa, Luhaäär, Osadnik) eprint.iacr.org/2026/359

Eurocrypt 2026 paper with (ex)students Erki Külaots, Roberto Parisella, @jannosiim.bsky.social : eprint.iacr.org/2026/326 Special Soundness and Binding Properties: A Framework for Tightly Secure zk-SNARKs

📢📢📢 𝐌𝐚𝐆𝐈𝐂 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐩 𝐨𝐧 𝐆𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐩 𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐂𝐫𝐲𝐩𝐭𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐡𝐲 In May 5-8, let's all gather together to speak about Group Actions! Early registration until March 8! Organized with Marco Baldi, @bsky.defeo.lu, @giacomoborin.bsky.social, @andreavbasso.bsky.social magic-workshop.github.io

Eurocrypt += 2 One paper with and Erki Külaots PhD student) Roberto Parisella, @jannosiim.bsky.social (all from Tartu) Another one with Albert Garrett (Nethermind), Urmas Luhaäär (PhD student, Tartu) and Michal Osadnik (Aalto) Will post more when ready for e-printing

Call for submissions: #TPMPC2026 (Theory & Practice of MPC) Submit your latest and coolest results by March 2, 2026. Aarhus, Denmark, May 18–22, 2026. Monday: MPC security in practice. Friday: Symposium celebrating Ivan Damgård’s work. Links in comments.

On using LLMs for research (beyond basic prompts). Section 3.2 is specifically about catching a bug in a recent SNARG paper arxiv.org/abs/2602.03837

#QIP2026 is coming to Riga in less than a week! Very excited to find my university (pictured) at the epicenter of a global academic event. PSA: Pack some *really* warm clothing - we've got a real winter this time ❄️

By an ex student (Behzad)

New ICORE conference rankings are out. Theory, logic and formal methods seem to have been heavily penalised. I vibe coded an analysis of, for each Field of Research (FOR), how many associated venues increased or decreased in rank. Here's the summary. FOR 4613 had 13 venues decrease their rank! 1/2

What is wild to me is the defense, BY THE NEURIPS BOARD, that fabricated citations do not mean "the content of the papers themselves [is] necessarily invalidated" It does. It very much does. What do you think citing other work is for? What do you think writing a paper is for? What do you *think*?

In 1943, Norwegian author Knut Hamsun gave his Nobel Prize to Joseph Goebbels. So history _does_ repeat itself.

that's an interesting experiment (as a cryptographer, i am of course worried by adversarial authors)

This sounds really cool

New year, new pairing

Super exciting work from Ziyi and Eylon! They construct the first SNARG for NP in the *plain* model (no random oracle) using *only* (subexponential) LWE! Perhaps most surprisingly, the SNARG is one (very clever) instantiation of the classical Killian-Micali construction!

It was a big year for mathematics. youtu.be/hRpcWpAeWng

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.

If you swap each letter in “bomb” with the next letter in the alphabet, you’ll get “cpnc.” Recently, scientists showed that and other methods can bypass filters on LLMs like Gemini, DeepSeek and Grok. @peterha2l.bsky.social reports: www.quantamagazine.org/cryptographe...

SVP_(p) is Deterministically NP-Hard for all p > 2, Even to Approximate Within a Factor of 2^(log^(1 − ε)n) (Isaac M Hair, Amit Sahai) ia.cr/2025/2181

Small-field hash-based SNARGs are less sound than conjectured (Giacomo Fenzi, Antonio Sanso) ia.cr/2025/2197

I've been going over the responses to the survey from IACR members about publishing and conferences, and I keep coming back to the fact that I think there should be _fewer_ conferences and _more_ journals. This coupling of talks to papers is not healthy.

(By ... an exstudent, Shuto)

Look, ma, we are in the News www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/w...

by ex-student (Hamid)

While I can understand how some reviewers in cryptography research are frustrated with the process, I cannot imagine how bad it is in machine learning. ncfrey.substack.com/p/publishing...

📣 Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU. Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.

TensorSwitch: Nearly Optimal Polynomial Commitments from Tensor Codes (Benedikt Bünz, Giacomo Fenzi, Ron D. Rothblum, William Wang) ia.cr/2025/2065

We are looking for a cybersecurity professor to strengthen Estonia's existing expertise. We are looking for an ambitious researcher (with a steady presence at big four security conferences) with demonstrated leadership skills who can build a larger team. iacr.org/jobs/item/4075

(accepted to TCC)

Europe is testing a digital age verification app to protect minors online. Bart Preneel warns it risks privacy, can be bypassed, and may exclude users. Could this be the end of online anonymity? www.standaard.be/media-en-cul... #ageverification #anonyimity #privacy

The Syndrome-Space Lens: A Complete Resolution of Proximity Gaps for Reed-Solomon Codes (Russell Okamoto) ia.cr/2025/1712

not again arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12341

RoK and Roll – Verifier-Efficient Random Projection for Õ(λ)-size Lattice Arguments (Michael Klooß, Russell W. F. Lai, Ngoc Khanh Nguyen, Michał Osadnik) ia.cr/2025/1220

Got my first "official AI review" today from AAAI. Amazing! Very detailed, with very specific technical comments. A shame the most crucial and confidently stated ones are deeply incorrect, though. Well you can't get everything I guess.

📢Adam Smith, @gautamkamath.com, and I are putting together a list of job market candidates in Foundations of Responsible Computing! Last year's list was a great success so we're keeping it going! If you want to be included, or nominate someone, see link in the replies!

Estonian-Latvian theory days this October: theorydays2025.quantum.lu.lv (local groups work in cryptography, type theory, quantum algorithms, complexity theory, automata theory, error-correcting codes and lately also in database theory)

New arXiv preprint: we show algorithmic versions of the polynomial Freiman–Ruzsa (PFR) theorem of Gowers, Green, Manners, and Tao. Interestingly, our proof draws on quantum information and stabilizer learning algorithms, which we dequantize into classical algorithms. arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02338

Double the discovery, double the momentum 🚀 Europe doubles down on research competitiveness with a major boost to #HorizonEurope: €95.5 billion foreseen for 2021-2027 💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰 €175 billion proposed for 2028-2034 💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰

New differential #privacy textbook in town: "DP in Artificial Intelligence: From Theory to Practice", by @nandofioretto.bsky.social and @vanhentenryck.bsky.social. Open access, w/ chapters by @jubaz.bsky.social, @grahamrc.bsky.social, and @stein.ke! www.nowpublishers.com/article/Book...

I wrote an op-ed on the world-class STEM research ecosystem in the United States, and how this ecosystem is now under attack on multiple fronts by the current administration: newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/im-an-awar...

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

Anyone who has been an IACR member in 2023-2026 should have received a link to respond to a survey about conferences and publishing. So far over 500 people have responded, but it will remain open for responses until Sept 12, 2025. I would also encourage people to use their forum invitations.