December was productive!

Merry Christmas!

We've had far more support than we ever imagined we would before #39C3, 516 of you beautiful people have backed already for €35,657! If that's you, thank you so much ☺️

I made a thing: folder.zone

I am now sufficiently French such that finding my favorite fromage at the fromagerie has a significant impact on my mood.

What my wife and I built this weekend

Kyber-K2SO now implements ML-KEM (FIPS 203): symbolic.software/blog/2025-12...

Computers are so much fun! So nice to have some time to finally relax this holiday season...

Thanks to everyone who voted, and to the IACR for running a fair election despite the problems that arose last month!

Some great talks to come at #RWC026 including 5 (!) from the Applied Cryptography research group @csateth.bsky.social on topics including Signal’s security, designing SecureDrop Next Generation, fuzzing of crypto libraries…. and one mystery topic still under embargo.

Hey! Hi! Hello! Our Kickstarter is... (drumroll, if you please) LIVE! You can find it riiiiight here: kickstarter.dotmeow.org But what IS .meow? Well! Let us explain... with video!

Noelle Holiday would *really* like Strasbourg during Christmas

@rwc.iacr.org accepted talks are out.... rwc.iacr.org/2026/accepte... I am not sure how they are going to fit them all into three days

DELTARUNE WINTER Newsletter Time! We're sending it out now, but it takes a good while to process hundreds of thousands of emails. Fortunately there's a cheat code to look at it whenever you want. Ha ha ha ha. toby.fangamer.com/newsletters/...

Cat: “I must show this human that I am content” *Starts vibrating*

Many life lessons here: youtu.be/6H4MMvaIpyk

Cyberattack on French Interior Ministry. Attackers compromised email servers, exploiting passwords shared in cleartext. They accessed critically sensitive police databases TAJ (criminal records) and FPR (wanted persons file), possibly extracting some files. www.franceinfo.fr/internet/sec...

I’m not the only guy who does this right?

Announcing Key Transparency for the Fediverse soatok.blog/2025/12/15/a... #fediverse #e2ee #keytrans #keytransparency #key-transparency #crypto #cryptography #privacy #opensource

another and slightly less stupid reality is possible

Time to bring out the Gore-Tex coat

My analysis. Polarisation does not exist in way it's to often described ('echo chambers'). But the mechanism can be exploited in propaganda, disinformation, mechanical information operations. Bonus: agreement with 'enemies of the group' is penalised socially. blog.lukaszolejnik.com/polarisation...

"Agreement with enemies” - for instance accepting their arguments - can be costly for people. It creates an incentive to maintain differences and disagreement. In this dynamic, even careful analysis and fact-based arguments can be perceived as a threat to the cohesion of a given social group.

Verifpal (yes, Verifpal) 0.28.0 is now available, bringing correctness fixes, race condition fixes, side effect fixes, nil pointer fixes, performance improvements and quality of life improvements.

20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple https://lobste.rs/s/sikol2 ##security ##ios

Woke up and while making coffee noticed that there is a giant fluffy cat on my balcony???? I’m on the third floor?????

Did you catch Jeopardy! last week? AUB made an appearance as one of the answers! #AcademicSky #EduSky

Proud to share that my 50 students averaged 82/100 on our final exam, which was administered on Monday. Many of these students hadn't heard of cryptography prior to registering for the course. Furthermore, the exam was legitimately not easy. See for yourself: appliedcryptography.page/final-exam

Students sending me Majora's Mask mixtape so I can listen to it while correcting final exam. What more could I ask for from this world

Thank you very much to my dear, diligent and indefatigable students for this highly considerate and kind gift. I’ll frame it and hang it in my office forever.

Announced the start of the final exam by stomping the floor with my right foot, hard, and yelling: “strike the earth! Show it what you are made of!”

"Analyzing the Performance of WebAssembly vs. Native Code" places a lot of the blame for the worse performance of wasm on register spills, esp. with JS engines' reserved registers. Sounds like APX could actually help by bumping the register count from 16 to 32? ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1901.09...

Breaking news: my personal website now has a full music player complete with WinAmp style animations, so you can listen to my favorite Deltarune covers while on my personal website, a very important thing. nadim.computer

They call it “Metroid Prime 4: Beyond” because I’m Beyond confused at the complaints reviewers had. Amazing game so far

New personal website: nadim.computer

Volt Forge in Metroid Prime 4 is unreal! I don’t know if I’m appreciating so much based on it really being this good or just because this is the first time I play a game after an exhausting four months, but the atmosphere! The music! The level design! The art direction! All unreal!

“Mass produced during the Machine Era but redesigned for the Psychic Era.”

Not sure how anyone can play the Carvex boss fight in Metroid Prime 4 and think it’s not a good game

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!

Big news. SMBC is expanding into the romance genre

This music really captures exactly how I feel about the past four months: music.youtube.com/watch?v=KBqG...

NEW PAPER: Zero-Knowledge Proof of Wasta with Applications in Lebanon eprint.gacr.info/2025/003/

New publication on the GACR ePrint Archive from David Naccache: eprint.gacr.info/2025/002/

I have learned so much about zero-knowledge merkle tree membership verification this week, for all the wrong reasons