My mom told me a quote today that my grandmother used to say after she would sign up for every free giveaway under the sun - “you can’t win if you don’t play.” And I kind of love that mentality for trying something in the face of overwhelming possibility of failure - generally the case in research

Happy new year! One of my New Year’s resolutions this year is to finally finish my gentle introduction to writing proofs in UC, for myself as well.. if anyone is interested in reviewing/contributing, please let me know! 🙌

I’m at SBC and Simon’s for the next week, looking forward to seeing everyone! Will be giving a talk on Thursday at Simon’s on our recent impossibility results on the adaptive security of threshold signatures- simons.berkeley.edu/talks/chelse...

2025: started out with Covid, got better, then relapsed into Covid 🤦‍♀️

Back to blue sky and happy new year!!!

After 3 years & 12 drafts, the RFC for FROST is complete! We hope this makes implementing FROST easier with fewer bugs 🐛 Thank you to everyone who helped by reviewing FROST security, submitting comments, and implementing the draft, this was a team effort 🙌💪 www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9591....

There's a mergesort step on page 12 that is costed at N log N. So I don't think this improves on Sam Jaques' eprint 2024/080 from a theoretical perspective. Nice implementation work though!

Consider donating your eclipse glasses to Eclipse Glasses USA so schoolchildren in South America can use them in October. eclipse23.com/pages/donate...

First podcast, check it out! :) zeroknowledge.fm/318-2/

This is jaw-dropping, wild news and should be criminal techcrunch.com/2024/03/26/f...

It's not a choice of one or the other. Use the appendix, as an author, to make reviewers see the value of sticky reviews and make them more likely to ask chairs to turn them on!

If you are on a PC for an IACR conference, consider reaching out to the PC chairs to request “sticky reviews”, to allow reviews from prior submissions to IACR conferences to be visible! Let’s make science better! 💪

I wish conferences asked papers to submit feedback received from prior submission attempts and a discussion of how the authors improved the paper since then… so much context is lost between submission attempts across different venues

Thanks for the amazing time #RealWorldCrypto, fantastic talks and conversations as always! See you next year in Europe :)

Changing my job title to “fancy cryptographer” thanks #RealWorldCrypto

Arctic: Lightweight and Stateless Threshold Schnorr Signatures (Chelsea Komlo, Ian Goldberg) ia.cr/2024/466

Hi Toronto! Looking forward to seeing everyone at #RealWorldCrypto 🇨🇦

I was asked today what the upper bound is on number of signers in threshold signature schemes used in practice today and I didn’t have a good answer… I’m assuming consensus schemes are larger, but does anyone know of signing groups of > 20? That seems on the larger side

Apparently those leading the anti-diversity programs at US public universities believe “a healthy society requires patriarchy”- why in 2023 are women with voices and brains considered to be such a threat www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

I wish there was more of a culture in cryptography of reaching out to authors to carefully double check claims before writing these claims in reviews or related work. I’ve seen *big* mistakes made- eg, by a reviewer that said my summary of my own prior work was wrong 🙃

I did this. Please do this; if you are a person who can get pregnant, have them on hand. I used AidAccess.org. I have a vision for care access where people can ask other people for abortion pills the way we call out for tampons in a public restroom. Though I suppose not in a *public* restroom.

Misuse resistant cryptography, but more. I want to see takes on it from more fields, like what do data centers need from it?

To anyone working on real-world cryptography- what would you like to see more of in cryptography research for 2024? Readable papers? Performance measurements? Accounting for specific failure cases? More PQ? Acceptance of non-standard assumptions? Solving certain problems?

No women on this list. www.nytimes.com/2023/12/03/t...

OMG Hahaha Those edit people had made to the Kissinger wiki article now appears as a featured response on the Google main page

PSA: the security for FROST requires only OMDL/ROM assumptions; it does not require the AGM!

Today I got to see bison and other animals at Yellowstone National Park!

I am very curious to see how the White House defends this bullshit.

Yubikeys but with a prompt that asks “are you sure you want to use this with this application?” first, to prevent me accidentally sending my yubikey password to the last chat in iMessage (as just happened)

This week, my coauthor and I discovered a break in the extremely nice scheme we’ve been working on for the past four months 😭

"There are no "free-riding" services on the Internet; India must uphold net neutrality": a just-released open letter, with powerful quotes from AccessNow's Raman Chima and Internet Society's Neeti Biyani www.accessnow.org/press-releas...

I recently gave a talk to a cryptography reading group on the paper "To Label, or Not To Label (in Generic Groups)"- I typed my notes here for anyone interested! writing.chelseakomlo.com/a-comparison...

Great piece on Ashton Kutcher's Thorn, which is pushing anti-privacy laws Thorn sells corp/police surveillance to "solve" child abuse & trafficking, even as service orgs & survivors question its efficacy https://www.thecut.com/article/ashton-kutcher-thorn-spotlight-rekognition-surveillance.html

I’m quoted in this new @sambiddle.bsky.social piece on the Heat Initiative, the advocacy org that recently spun off from the Ashton Kutcher-founded child safety org Thorn: theintercept.com/2023/10/01/a...

Boy math is giving performance numbers for a crypto scheme with sub-components modeled as idealized functionality and then only citations to the expensive concrete instances of that functionality

I participated in the NIST threshold workshop today- it is a huge effort and hopefully helpful to the wider adoption of advanced crypto! I’m also happy to say that we have an *amazing* team for a FROST submission; thanks to everyone involved 🎊 💪 github.com/chelseakomlo...

This weekend’s reading includes this beautifully written paper on the relationship between several idealized models- the ROM, Shoup’s GGM, and the generic bilinear map model (GBM) eprint.iacr.org/2021/240

cis white guys who comment on how much luggage other people are taking on business trips… you gotta remember you’re the *only* people who can reliably get professional respect while wearing a single kinda-smelly casual outfit and a single pair of shoes for a week

Posting these a little late, but I still want to celebrate! A couple weeks ago I had the honor or receiving an early career award at Crypto ‘23 along with Mary Maller and Elizabeth Crites! 🎊🙏💪 Here’s to more to come and to collaborating with great people and great friends

Ya know how women say all the time they’re afraid to come forward with something because of the fear they’ll be accused of lying and making it up?

Next is the Best Early Career Paper: “Fully Adaptive Schnorr Threshold Signatures” by Elizabeth Crites, @chelseakomlo.bsky.social, and Mary Maller (eprint.iacr.org/2023/445)

Woah earthquake !

Hello Santa Barbara! Looking forward to Crypto :)

It’s finally out 😅

Snowblind: A Threshold Blind Signature in Pairing-Free Groups (Elizabeth Crites, Chelsea Komlo, Mary Maller, Stefano Tessaro, Chenzhi Zhu) ia.cr/2023/1228

My liberal California state senator is sponsoring a social media censorship bill that will deny kids life saving information and community. If you're in California let your legislators know you oppose SB 680

The best way to get over conference jet lag is to go out for a ridiculous meal with your bestie! In Barcelona

Seriously, call your Senators now. This needs to be stopped before it goes any further. They want to drive LGBTQIA+ off the internet entirely, and Democrats are on board. https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/25/influencers-starting-to-realize-how-the-kids-online-safety-act-kosa-will-do-real-damage/

This is why end to end encryption for personal messaging services matters. Shame on Facebook for not encrypting dms.