Microsoft #PhotoDNA, long seen as a cornerstone of image‑scanning, has been shown by COSIC and UGent researchers to be vulnerable to evasion, false positives and partial image reconstruction - raising serious questions about its reliability and #privacy. cyberinsider.com/microsoft-ph...

Research by Maxime Deryck (UGent), Diane Leblanc-Albarel and Bart Preneel (COSIC, KU Leuven) is featured in CyberInsidercom: "Microsoft #PhotoDNA is vulnerable to false positives and data leakage". cyberinsider.com/microsoft-ph...

#Pokémon GO didn’t just capture creatures - it captured data that now helps robots navigate cities. Prof. Bart Preneel in De Morgen: "For AI companies, building such datasets themselves would be impossible - so people pay with their data." www.demorgen.be/nieuws/u-dac... #pokemongo

Expander properties of superspecial isogeny digraphs with level structure (Thomas Decru, Krijn Reijnders) ia.cr/2026/500

Curious about the #WhisperPair vulnerabilities in Google’s Fast Pair protocol - impacting hundreds of millions of Bluetooth devices? Join the authors next week for a free COSIC seminar on March 26 to learn more. www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/?post_...

PIKE: Faster Isogeny-Based Public Key Encryption with Pairing-Assisted Decryption (Shiping Cai, Mingjie Chen, Yi-Fu Lai, Kaizhan Lin) ia.cr/2026/473

Fault to Forge: Fault Assisted Forging Attacks on LESS Signature Scheme (Puja Mondal, Suparna Kundu, Hikaru Nishiyama, Supriya Adhikary, Daisuke Fujimoto, Yuichi Hayashi, Angshuman Karmakar) ia.cr/2025/1838

White-Box Attacks on PhotoDNA Perceptual Hash Function (Maxime Deryck, Diane Leblanc-Albarel, Bart Preneel) ia.cr/2026/486

Save the date! The COSIC Course on Cryptography and Cybersecurity will take place in Heverlee (Leuven, Belgium) from 22–25 June 2026. A unique, expert‑driven program covering the foundations and latest developments in crypto & cybersecurity. Website and registration coming soon!

COSIC researcher Martin Zbudila presented "#MOZAIK: A Privacy-Preserving Analytics Platform for IoT Data Using MPC" at #RWMPC in Taiwan. www.mpcalliance.org/rwmpc-2026 Paper in the Journal of Network and Systems Management: link.springer.com/article/10.1... Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2601.02245

🎉 Proud moment for COSIC! Prof. Nigel Smart has received the #RSAC 2026 Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics for his groundbreaking work in #MPC, Threshold #Cryptography & foundational crypto research. Congratulations, Nigel! 👏 www.rsaconference.com/library/pres...

Bart Preneel on Australia’s new age‑verification rules for adult sites on vrtnws: "Alongside education for youth and parents, I see more value in voluntary technical solutions." www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/20...

Bart Preneel discusses Australia’s new age‑verification rules for adult sites on the #VRTnws podcast #HetKwartier, warning about the privacy risks: www.vrt.be/vrtmax/podca...

PRISM with a pinch of salt: Simple, Efficient and Strongly Unforgeable Signatures from Isogenies (Andrea Basso, Giacomo Borin, Wouter Castryck, Maria Corte-Real Santos, Riccardo Invernizzi, Antonin Leroux, Luciano Maino, Frederik Vercauteren, Benjamin Wesolowski) ia.cr/2026/443

Your earbuds can be hijacked & tracked in seconds! At Black Hat Asia 2026 COSIC & DistriNet researchers will present WhisperPair (whisperpair.eu), showing how nearby attackers can hijack Fast Pair devices & use them for covert tracking and stalking.

COSIC researcher Mahdi Sedaghat presented Post-Quantum Readiness in EdDSA Chains at FC 2026 in St. Kitts. #fc2026 #cryptography #fc fc26.ifca.ai/program.html

KU Leuven cryptography expert Prof. Bart Preneel says in Nieuwsblad tools like #GrayKey don’t surprise him, it’s a constant cat‑and‑mouse game between smartphone makers and those trying to break their security. www.nieuwsblad.be/binnenland/o... (paywall)

Security & privacy expert Bart Preneel appeared on Belgian Radio 1 yesterday to criticize mandatory age verification on social media: “Even every adult will have to permanently prove they are older than 13, 16, or 21.” Read his opinion piece (paywall): www.standaard.be/opinies/verp... #chatcontrol

Bart Preneel in Assured: "Invest sufficiently in cybersecurity and operational resilience, both in terms of governance (people and processes) and technology": assured.co.uk/2026/dial-c-...

Bart Preneel wrote in the print edition of De Standaard: Europe’s push for mandatory online age checks risks a 'Great Firewall.' Protecting youth is vital, but mass verification threatens #privacy, digital inclusion, and freedom, and is easy to bypass.

This week in COSIC... Tomorrow Addie Neyt (COSIC) is giving a seminar on "Improved differential cryptanalysis of SPEEDY", free to attend! More info on www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/?post_...

Great news, the COSIC Seminar on "Revisiting (Standard, Rotational, Internal) Differential-Linear Cryptanalysis via a Walsh-Transform Perspective" by Jiahui He (COSIC) is now available on our YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VsR...

RISQrypt: Fast, Secure and Agile Hardware-Software Co-Design for Post-Quantum Cryptography (Tolun Tosun, Atıl Utku Ay, Quinten Norga, Suparna Kundu, Melik Yazıcı, Erkay Savaş, Ingrid Verbauwhede) ia.cr/2026/312

Tripling on Hessian curves via isogeny decomposition (Thomas Decru, Sabrina Kunzweiler) ia.cr/2026/334

Area-Efficient LUT-Based Multipliers for AMD Versal FPGAs (Zetao Miao, Xander Pottier, Jonas Bertels, Wouter Legiest, Ingrid Verbauwhede) ia.cr/2026/344

Leveled Isogeny Problems with Hints (Subham Das, Riccardo Invernizzi, Péter Kutas, Jonas Meers) ia.cr/2025/2075

Lie algebras and the security of cryptosystems based on classical varieties in disguise (Wouter Castryck, Mingjie Chen, Péter Kutas, Jun Bo Lau, Alexander Lemmens, Mickael Montessinos) ia.cr/2026/351

qt-Pegasis: Simpler and Faster Effective Class Group Actions (Pierrick Dartois, Jonathan Komada Eriksen, Riccardo Invernizzi, Frederik Vercauteren) ia.cr/2025/1859

🎥The COSIC Seminar "Post-Quantum Readiness in EdDSA Chains" by Mahdi Sedaghat (COSIC) is now freely available on our YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5Ux...

Welcome to Ankan Ghosh, a visitor working on Android malware detection. "COSIC stands as a global benchmark for cryptographic and cybersecurity research. I chose COSIC not just for its heritage, but to contribute to the next generation of breakthroughs." #choosecosic

Aniket Basak is visiting us from Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. Welcome! #choosecosic

📢 COSIC summer internships are live! Interested in cryptography and cybersecurity research this summer? Check out the open internship positions here 👉https://www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/internships-eng/

Because sharing research results matters to us: the recordings of the #PQCSA workshop in Brussels on “Open-Source PQC Libraries and Implementations” are now freely available on the COSIC YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... #postquantum #pqc

Key Committing Security of HCTR2, Revisited (Donghoon Chang, Yu Long Chen, Yukihito Hiraga, Kazuhiko Minematsu, Nicky Mouha, Yusuke Naito, Yu Sasaki, Takeshi Sugawara) ia.cr/2026/254

SCA-MQDSA: Side-Channel Analysis of Multivariate Digital Signature Implementations (N.K. Vishwaajith, Anindya Ganguly, Debranjan Pal, Trevor Yap, Puja Mondal, Suparna Kundu, Sayandeep Saha, Shivam Bhasin, Ingrid Verbauwhede, Angshuman Karmakar) ia.cr/2026/228

Meet-in-the-Middle Attacks on Full ChiLow-32 (Eran Lambooij, Patrick Neumann, Michiel Verbauwhede) ia.cr/2025/1601

We are looking for a PhD researcher to work on Practical Implementations of Fully Homomorphic Encryption. Want to join our team? Visit www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/vacanc... #choosecosic

Vansh Deshwal is visiting us from the Indian Statistical Institute, working at the intersection of AI and security. "I chose COSIC because of its strong reputation in practical cryptography and cybersecurity, and the kind of real-world work the group is known for." #choosecosic

Last week COSIC researcher Jiayi Kang gave a lecture on homomorphic encryption as part of the ASCI (Advanced School for Computing and Imaging) course "A10: Rings and Finite Fields in Modern Cryptography". asci.school/project/3231/

📹The COSIC Seminar "Secure Transport Protocols" by Hosam El Koulak is now available on our YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cac2...

Please welcome our new PhD student Sina Bagheri: "I chose COSIC for its world-class reputation in security and vibrant environment. It came highly recommended by friends, and I’m excited to contribute to the team’s research on secure hardware!" #choosecosic

Madhav Verma is a new visitor in COSIC, welcome! "I chose COSIC because if you want to do serious cryptography and cryptanalysis, this is one of the places where it’s done properly, with depth and impact." #choosecosic

📹The COSIC Seminar "When AI Leaves the Lab: Security, Robustness, and Trust in Modern AI Systems" by PhD researcher Alireza Aghabagherloo (COSIC) is now available on our YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj48...

Shorter, Tighter, FAESTer: Optimizations and Improved (QROM) Analysis for VOLE-in-the-Head Signatures (Carsten Baum et al.et al.et al.) ia.cr/2026/164

Pairwise independence of AES-like block ciphers (Tim Beyne, Gregor Leander, Immo Schütt) ia.cr/2025/1495

On the Active Security of the PEARL-SCALLOP Group Action (Tako Boris Fouotsa, Marc Houben, Gioella Lorenzon, Ryan Rueger, Parsa Tasbihgou) ia.cr/2026/191

This week in COSIC... Tomorrow we have a seminar by Alireza Aghabagherloo about "When AI Leaves the Lab: Security, Robustness, and Trust in Modern AI Systems". Check our calendar on www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/?post_...

Pablo Sánchez Serrano is visiting us from the University of Málaga. His PhD focuses on Privacy and AI, with two primary goals: leveraging AI techniques as privacy-enhancing technologies, and protecting sensitive information throughout the AI training lifecycle. #choosecosic

Welcome to our new intern, Neeranuch Jitkhajornwanich! She will be researching "Dissymmetric Modes for Symmetric Cryptography: Leveraging Unbalanced Ends in IoT Protocols" during her stay here. #choosecosic

Jonas Bertels successfully defended his PhD thesis today, congratulations! 🎓🎉🍾