cryptography

This article examines the persistent gap in self-sovereign PKI for humans, where messaging apps like Signal and iMessage rely on manual key verification that users rarely perform, and proposes that current naming systems fail to provide both human-meaningful and cryptographically anchored identities.

An article exploring the philosophical and practical meaning of randomness, using lava lamps as a metaphor for entropy generation in computing.

Debunks common myths about /dev/urandom and /dev/random, explaining that /dev/urandom is the preferred source of cryptographic randomness on Unix-like systems.

The article discusses the current state of the FN-DSA post-quantum signature standard, its standardization delays, and essential caveats for deployment, including prehashing considerations.

A new type of zero-knowledge proof leverages Gödel's incompleteness theorems to overcome previous limitations of secrecy, establishing a striking connection between mathematical logic and cryptography.

The article introduces the concept of Beaver Triples in the context of Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) using a practical example of friends privately deciding on a restaurant. It explains how secret sharing allows participants to compute group-level scores based on private inputs without revealing individual data.

An educational essay explaining the Birthday Paradox math and its application to hash collisions in cryptography, covering probability calculations for matching birthdays and the historical context of Richard von Mises' contributions.

Symbolic releases hpke-ng, a new Rust implementation of HPKE (RFC 9180) designed for better performance and security by avoiding the bugs and abstractions found in existing libraries like hpke-rs.

This article presents a cryptographic research paper revisiting Post-Quantum WireGuard, exploring methods to secure the WireGuard VPN protocol against future quantum computing threats.

Signal Shot is a major formal verification initiative to verify the Signal protocol and its Rust implementation using Lean, combining advances in Rust-to-Lean translation (Aeneas), mathematical foundations (Mathlib/CSLib), automated tactics (grind/SymM), and AI-assisted formalization. This represents a significant test of whether Lean can scale from pure mathematics to deployed real-world software systems.

An analysis clarifies that quantum computers do not pose a threat to 128-bit symmetric cryptographic keys like AES-128, contrary to common misconceptions about Grover's algorithm. The article explains why symmetric key sizes do not need to change as part of post-quantum transition efforts, aligning with expert and standardization body consensus.

Second part of an illustrated primer explaining real-world anonymous credential systems like Privacy Pass and Google's age-verification proposal, focusing on preventing credential cloning and enabling expressive proofs without sacrificing user privacy.

OpenAI publishes an article exploring reasoning techniques with LLMs through cipher-decoding examples, demonstrating step-by-step problem-solving approaches and pattern recognition in language models.

This paper extends the study of computational hardness in learning robust classifiers, showing that efficient robust classification can be impossible even when unbounded robust classifiers exist, and establishing a win-win result: either an efficient robust classifier can be learned, or new cryptographic primitives can be constructed.