Go MAYO!! Moving to the third round of the PQC NIST process!

Round 3 of the NIST additional signatures process announced! 🎉 And SQIsign is part of it!! ⛷️⛷️

This 1952 memo from the Pentagon UFO files is superb There is no point preparing for aliens ‘because no one of consequence is going to take this rubbish seriously unless it happens. At that point, our policy will be determined in the traditional manner of grand panic.’ 🤣 www.war.gov/medialink/uf...

Join us tomorrow for ProTeCS, one of Eurocrypt’s affiliated events! We are thankful to have two amazing invited speakers, Bart Mennink and Mike Rosulek! We are also happy to have seven contributed talks from the community. Check out our full program here: protecs-workshop.gitlab.io/program

A Survey on Security Reductions in Post-Quantum Cryptography (Thomas Attema, Ronald Cramer, Serge Fehr, Yu-Hsuan Huang, Bor de Kock, Jana Sotáková) ia.cr/2026/846

The Cryptographic Applications Workshop (CAW) happens this Sunday in Rome! Just a reminder that if you're not coming to Rome you can still attend remotely. Just register here: forms.gle/2JZ7hLs8diQM... before May 8. See caw.cryptanalysis.fun for more infos and our program.

Collected all badges!

Two weeks ago, Google published a paper proving in zero-knowledge that they had an efficient implementation of Shor's algorithm. Today, Trail of Bits can prove that we have an even better implementation which beats Google's on all metrics! 🫢 blog.trailofbits.com/2026/04/17/w...

I'm looking for a PhD student to work with me on formal verification for cryptographic protocols. This is a 4-year position at VU Amsterdam, co-supervised with Kristina Sojakova. Send me an email if you want to know more!

Open Problems in List Decoding and Correlated Agreement (Gal Arnon, Dan Boneh, Giacomo Fenzi) ia.cr/2026/680

The Signal protocol is well documented but hard to grasp the first time. Especially what's happening under the hood while using a messaging app. I built an educational tool that lets you chat on a simulated phone and see protocol details in real time, completely offline. Enjoy!

Major announcement: My highly successful Applied Cryptography course taught last year at the American University of Beirut is returning as an online course, available for FREE for any qualifying student from any Lebanese university! Read more + apply today — and please spread the word!

Huge congrats to Bennett and Brassard for the well-deserved award, but the highlighted sentence from the ACM announcement (www.acm.org/media-center...) is a rather odd take on PQC ...

Watching remotely? You can follow Real World Crypto 2026 on YouTube livestreams (also available via the website): Day 1 (Mar 9): youtube.com/live/QQhyxFj... Day 2 (Mar 10): youtube.com/live/00zvMSW... Day 3 (Mar 11): youtube.com/live/v_AFtbW...

If you liked this experiment, I published a full piece today in the same vein: a text that gets 100 years older with every section, from a modern blog post to a medieval chronicle. It's a single story spanning 1000 years of English. See how far you get. www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...

monosketch.io (pretty nice tool!)

The IACR board sent a survey to members last year, and it took us a while to analyze the results and publish findings. You can see them at iacr.org/surveyresults/

At the gpg.fail talk and omg #39c3 You can just put a \0 in the Hash: header and then newlines and inject text in a cleartext message. Won’t even blame PGP here. C is unsafe at any speed. gpg has not fixed it yet.

The accepted talks for Real World Crypto 2026 are now online: rwc.iacr.org/2026/accepte... Thanks to everyone who submitted, and we look forward to the discussions at the symposium.

Interesting read lawrencecpaulson.github.io//2025/12/05/...

Made a site comparing the sizes of living things :) The great Julius Csotonyi spent 5 months painting over 60 illustrations for the site, no ai used > neal.fun/size-of-life/

Happy to announce the posting of D1.1 Survey of PQC algorithms D1.3 Hot Topics and Open Problems in Post-Quantum Cryptography D2.1 Survey of PQC protocols pqcsa.eu/deliverables... There are no formally approved deliverables, yet. These drafts are provided as is for the interest of the community.

We take a look at hash-based schemes, and how they fit in Bitcoin. The paper gives a broad overview of different schemes, including SPHINCS+ and several recent modification. For readers seeking a gentle introduction to hash-based schemes, we hope this work offers a helpful starting point.

Interested in the security of MPC implementations? Peter Scholl (@schollster.bsky.social) and I are looking for research interns to study the theory/practice gap for MPC. We can host multiple interns in Aarhus for the summer 2026. More information: mpcinthewild.github.io Help us spread the word!

This Humble Bundle has a lot of really good hacking books from No Starch Press, and it supports EFF! Get it!

How many cryptographers are does it take to run a successful election? N+1 where N is the numbers of shareholders needed to decrypt and 1 with backups of the keys "just in case" #DecryptTencrede

The call for talks for CAW 2026 (a workshop affiliated with Eurocrypt) is out! This year's motto is "cryptography under real-world constraints and threat models", but other applied cryptography is also very welcome. All info is on: caw.cryptanalysis.fun.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

arXiv CS category has stopped accepting review articles and position papers (e.g., SoK) unless they have been peer-reviewed blog.arxiv.org/2025/10/31/a...

Anonymous credentials are going to have a big year. In the realm of "fancy" cryptography, they're perhaps the most important primitive we'll need to make PQ. Where do we stand? Lena Heimberger spent part of the summer finding out. blog.cloudflare.com/pq-anonymous...

Researchers pointed a satellite dish at the sky for 3 years and monitored what unencrypted data it picked up. The results were shocking: They obtained thousands of T-Mobile users' phone calls and texts, military and law enforcement secrets, much more: www.wired.com/story/satell... 🧵👇

In 2023, Signal was the first mainstream messenger to enable post-quantum cryptography. We’re still ahead of the (elliptical) curve, implementing a new hybrid PQ ratchet ensuring Forward Secrecy & Post-Compromise Security even in a post-quantum world. signal.org/blog/spqr/

Computationally-Sound Symbolic Cryptography in Lean (Stefan Dziembowski, Grzegorz Fabiański, Daniele Micciancio, Rafał Stefański) ia.cr/2025/1700

Another update: someone claims to have fixed the bug!

Stuck at level 44, not good at chess 🥲

Super cool!

The Call for Contributed Talks is now open for RWC 2026! And the deadline for submissions is now Oct. 10, 2025. rwc.iacr.org/2026/contrib...

May the Force not Be with you: Brute-Force Resistant Biometric Authentication and Key Reconstruction (Alexandra Boldyreva, Deep Inder Mohan, Tianxin Tang) ia.cr/2025/1211

Last Friday Scott Aaronson gave a plenary talk at STOC titled "The Status of Quantum Speedups". acm-stoc.org/stoc2025/key... Here are his slides: www.scottaaronson.com/talks/status...

We launched CoverDrop 🎉 providing sources with a secure and anonymous way to talk to journalists. Having started five years ago as a PhD research project, this now ships within the Guardian app to millions of users—all of which provide cover traffic. Paper, code, and more info: www.coverdrop.org

This is how you build secure systems: public source code, solid theoretical foundation, and third-party audits. Impressive. (Note: maybe we'll find flaws in this! And then they'll get fixed, thanks to transparency. That's also how secure systems work.) www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-of...

wow, they implemented OAuth with Claude and included the prompts used in the commit messages github.com/cloudflare/w...

Internet Roadtrip is my favorite thing on the internet right now—it’s basically Twitch Plays Google Street View. They started in Boston, spent several weeks on a quest to cross the Canadian border, and are now exploring New Brunswick. neal.fun/internet-roa...

Diving Deep Into UC: Uncovering and Resolving Issues in Universal Composability (Céline Chevalier, Éric Sageloli) ia.cr/2025/934

I found it quite interesting that "compressed sensing" is also used here. We applied it more directly in a paper on recovering the secret sparse vector from inner products perturbed with noise, in the context of PSI.