My time at RUB is coming to an end and I'm looking for an industry position. Primarily looking for remote or Rhine-Ruhr area positions, but will consider any exceptional offers. So if you're looking to hire a cryptographer to work on cryptographic protocols, or related areas, maybe we should talk!

A very nice explainer why "if you're so worried about quantum computers, why haven't they factored 21 yet?" isn't a very convincing argument. Look at the labels of the graph, and how extremely close the various lines are for factoring 21 and 2048 bit numbers. Polynomial scaling remains […]

major update github.com/veorq/awesom...

I am very excited that our work on secure cloud storage is now online. A big shoutout also to my co-author @jonasjanneck.bsky.social who will present the results at Eurocrypt’26!

USENIX chair report: "six individuals appear as co-authors on 20 or more submissions, with two authors appearing on 36 and 39 submissions respectively. At such volume, it becomes difficult not to question the nature and depth of the contributions" www.usenix.org/sites/defaul...

Congratulations, Dr. Phillip Gajland for successfully defending his PhD thesis! It was a great journey!

Eurocrypt 2025!

I wrote up a detailed analysis of TM SGNL, the unofficial Signal app that senior Trump fascists use to organize their war crimes micahflee.com/tm-sgnl-the-...

It’s hard to believe it’s been over three years since I joined RUB @ruhr-uni-bochum.de ! Time really flies. Bochum has an incredibly vibrant and excellent cybersecurity research community. m.youtube.com/watch?v=mKxy...

The 3rd edition of WISC – Women in Security and Cryptography Workshop will take place in Bochum from June 16 to 18. Already confirmed are talks by Lejla Batina, Zinaida Benenson, Shafi Goldwasser, Martina Lindorfer, and Doreen Riepel. Registration is open now! casa.rub.de/en/events/wi...

Why is slack so stupid?

TIL that the term Σ-protocol (3-move ZKP) has been coined by Cramer in his '97 PhD thesis, that it refers to SIG (like in zig-zag) and MA from Merlin-Arthur (like in Arthur-Merlin Protocol; MA is also a complexity class) and that it was used for the first time only in a PKC'00 paper. What a day!

Origami Black Hole xkcd.com/3033

www.theregister.com/2024/12/17/a... NIST gives you 10, but Australia gives you 5. Not ratings, but number of years to transition away from SHA, RSA, Ecdsa, etc.