south africa withdraws own government AI policy over hallucinated citations www.reuters.com/world/africa...

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...

This is a great (and horrifying?) piece about how Sam, in preparation for her marriage, was pulled into the bridal algorithm. Her experience of social media changed completely overnight www.404media.co/wedding-plan...

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 […]

🎉 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...

A very nice blogpost explaining our work - slices right through the marketing from the vendors: medium.com/reading-sh/y...

Call for submissions: #TPMPC2026 (Theory & Practice of MPC) Submit your latest and coolest results by March 2, 2026. Aarhus, Denmark, May 18–22, 2026. Monday: MPC security in practice. Friday: Symposium celebrating Ivan Damgård’s work. Links in comments.

The robot apocalypse hasn't happened yet, but still I can't escape the feeling that something has gone horribly wrong... Cartoon for Dutch newspaper @trouw.nl. More of my work for Trouw: www.trouw.nl/cartoons/tje... #ArtificialIntelligence #creativity #work #GenerativeAI

The number of people arguing, following the #NeurIPS2025 case, that a bit of systematically bad scholarship and borderline academic misconduct is OK because doing things the right way is tedious and time-consuming is concerning. Yes, doing things well might be boring. But doing them badly is... bad

Advice for Jens Eisert. doi.org/10.1038/d415...

Consider signing this petition regarding restoring free access to the ACM digital library: www.ipetitions.com/petition/res...

Deadline is January 7. Still a few days left to apply...

Privacy issues are unlikely to go away in 2026. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

The latest version of MP-SPDZ can predict the communication cost when compiling high-level code. github.com/data61/MP-SP...

Fully robust MPC protocol over Galois Rings, executing a TFHE DKG protocol amongst 13 parties, taking 55 hours, with 10.5 Terabytes of data sent per party.... www.zama.org/post/decentr...

Come work with Peter Scholl @schollster.bsky.social and me in Aarhus!

Cryptography shows that AI filters will never work.... www.quantamagazine.org/cryptographe... Nice application of crypto to AI, and shows that AI has inherent limitations.

If you swap each letter in “bomb” with the next letter in the alphabet, you’ll get “cpnc.” Recently, scientists showed that and other methods can bypass filters on LLMs like Gemini, DeepSeek and Grok. @peterha2l.bsky.social reports: www.quantamagazine.org/cryptographe...

On the internet, age verification doesn't know you're a dog.

"Maybe the name EasyCrypt isn't quite deserved." - @cryptojedi.bsky.social at his Asiacrypt keynote

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!

📢 Announcing hacklore.org 📢 It’s time to retire outdated cyber advice! More than 80 cybersecurity veterans have signed an open letter urging a shift from folklore to guidance that actually helps people avoid the most common attacks. 🔐 Blog: medium.com/@boblord/let... Site: www.hacklore.org

One of the motivations for MP-SPDZ was not getting bogged down by this kind of arguments when they are just hypothetical. Every use case has its own trade-offs as the IACR just found out.

Just saw an extended version

This is a nuts story. An AI chatbot and image platform left millions of images exposed. They show what people are actually using the AI for: taking random women's yearbook, graduation, and social media photos and making super realistic hardcore porn with them www.404media.co/ai-porn-secr...

NEW: The US Department of Justice issued a warrant demanding SpaceX seize and disable Starlink devices and accounts being used at a scam compound in Myanmar. At least 9 Starlink devices were linked to a crypto scam that stole $6 million people, an FBI affidavit says Story with @lhn.bsky.social

A staggering statistic: "North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year." What are we doing?

Thanks to Hidde Lycklama, MP-SPDZ now supports BERT inference. github.com/data61/MP-SP...

Getting nervous for the talk I'm about to give at a workshop about "using AI to drive impact" which features slides such as these.

Why @sydney.yimby.au: www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Remarkable, but important to notice that the change only applies to review/survey and position papers

The AWS outage bricked people's $2,700 smartbeds, leaving them in a reclining position or with the heat up. People were unable to use them, basically. A GitHub repo exists that lets people operate their beds without reliance on the normal infrastructure www.404media.co/the-aws-outa...

Our protocol is simple & modular: it works in the "Arithmetic Black Box" model, and inherits the security properties of the ABB instantiation (passive/active, static/adaptive, etc.). Using SPDℤ₂𝑘 for ABB, we get about 20,000x and 37x better throughput and latency than SoTA for dishonest majority.

openai to finally acknowledge what has been driving the AI boom for years and years but no one really wants to admit: chatbots you can fuck www.404media.co/chatgpt-erot...

This is amazing research by Nadia Heninger and her co-authors Wenyi Morty Zhang, Annie Dai, Keegan Ryan, Dave Levin and Aaron Schulman. TL;DR a huge number of satellite links over our heads are totally unencrypted. satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu

📢 Come be my colleague: the School of Computer Science at 🇦🇺 #USyd is hiring! Multiple tenure-track-equivalent positions across the board (including theory!), but with a specific focus on Cybersecurity and Trustworthy Digital Systems, and ML/AI. ⏰ Dec 1 usyd.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/USYD_E...

Japan once again wins the IG Nobel Prize, this year for research showing that painting a cow to look like a zebra decreases bug bites by close to 50% www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/artic...

a bug in this may have already been found

New campus, who dis?

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

Your favourite remote castle just started skeeting. bsky.app/profile/dags...

roses are red violets are blue singular they predates singular you

This cartoon is so on the money and could as easily be about OpenAI as about any AI powered startup www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

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.

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...

In a new digital twist to environmental individualisation of responsibility, the UK government is now advising people to “[d]elete old emails and pictures” in data centres to help with the current drought. www.gov.uk/government/n...

Springer publishes a P ≠ NP "proof" and Eric Allender has words to say. blog.computationalco...