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.

Back to actual research… We present a family of space-efficient sumcheck algorithms, and show that they are optimal! 🍹 Joint work with Anubhav, Ale, Elisabetta, @zkproofs.bsky.social, Tushar and Andrew 📚: ia.cr/2025/1473 🧑🏻‍💻: github.com/compsec-epfl...

The depth was probably zero

haha :D

#IPAM (the institute for pure and applied mathematics) is facing a critical shortfall for operating expenses due to an unexpected suspension of NSF funding www.ipam.ucla.edu/news/nsf-fun... . Donations for emergency continuity of operations funding can be made at giving.ucla.edu/Campaign/Donat

Crypto 2025 program is online. Five sessions on proof systems, one on Fiat-Shamir, one on Polynomial Commitments. I hope we can cool down the audience after the LatticeFold+ talk

Crypto 2025 has a session for the Back of the Future fans :)

Helsinki Algorithms & Theory Days on 28–29 August, 2025, keynote talk by Andris Ambainis algorithms.fi/theory-days-...

Very promising news on the next seven-year EU budget, with a proposed substantial increase for Horizon Europe including the ERC. We are analysing the other parts of this proposal in more detail. @Vonderleyen @EZaharievaEU research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/news/all-res...

After 78 years, an exponential improvement for Ramsey numbers were found by Jie Ma, Wujie Shen, and Shengjie Xie. gilkalai.wordpress.com/2025/07/23/a...

2/2 "The field is moving...much faster than we know how to make things safe," said Carlini. Cryptographers and security experts have the analytical skills to help make ML safe. "Maybe we can keep pace to make things not get any worse than they are now." Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/nichol...

Literally, amazed

We updated our paper on Fiat-Shamir! We now take a closer look at the gap between what symmetric cryptography has focused on for over 10 years (indifferentiability) and what is actually needed for the soundness of ZKPs and SNARKs (something stronger!). eprint.iacr.org/2025/536

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

The mathematician Boaz Klartag recently published the biggest improvement in high-dimensional sphere-packing since 1947. “I thought, I’m 47 years old, all my life I wanted to study lattices, if I don’t do it now then it’s never going to happen.” www.quantamagazine.org/new-sphere-p...

"Simpler and Faster Pairings from the Montgomery Ladder" by Giacomo Pope, Krijn Reijnders (COSIC), Damien Robert, Alessandro Sferlazza & Benjamin Smith published in IACR Communications in Cryptology and online now: cic.iacr.org/p/2/2/29 #ISOCRYPT #ISOCRYPTproject

Quanta on the recent Fiat-Shamir and GKR work. (One of the most shocking results recently in the ZK area.)

includes two papers by ex-students (Karim, Roberto, and @jannosiim.bsky.social ): On Round-Optimal Computational VSS Karim Baghery, Navid Ghaedi Bardeh, Shahram Khazaei, Mahdi Rahimi Revisiting Discrete Logarithm Reductions Maiara F. Bollauf, Roberto Parisella, Janno Siim