(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

White text on white background instructing LLMs to give positive reviews is apparently now common enough to show up in searches for boilerplate text.

Karim is an exstudent

Ex student

So What Do We Know QC To Be Good For? - Simulating quantum physics and chemistry - Breaking current public-key encryption (RSA, DH, ECC) - Eventually, modest (square-root) speedups from Grover - We’ll have to get lucky for most other applications! (The world has been systemically lied to about this)

On top of its standard Advanced Grant funding, the ERC offers additional 'start-up' funding to help new grantees coming from outside Europe establish their laboratories or research team in Europe. This funding has increased to up to €2 million. europa.eu/!6Vdgmp

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!

It was definitely an interesting event to attend to!

IACR needs to stimulate a conversation among members about what to do with conferences and publishing in order to scale things. There will be a survey coming out, but I'm thinking that we need something like a discourse server to foster discussion.

by two people of my current group (Maiara and @jannosiim.bsky.social) and an ex-student (Roberto)

Recent reasoning paper from Apple is an interesting study, & getting much attention (e.g., article below), but.... (1/2) www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

And that's a wrap for this season of TCS+ 🎉! You can watch the recordings of the talks, and peruse the slides, on our website and YouTube channel: 🔗 sites.google.com/view/tcsplus... 📽️ www.youtube.com/@TCSplusSemi... See you in a couple months... do suggest talks! 📋 sites.google.com/view/tcsplus...