cryptography

The White House issued an executive order shortening the deadline for transitioning to quantum-resistant encryption to 2030/2031, citing reduced cost estimates for quantum computers and the threat of harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks.

This paper presents Delta-Star, a deep reinforcement learning approach using AlphaZero-style self-play to discover superior lattice reduction strategies by interacting with the primitive actions of the LLL algorithm. The learned policy generalizes to higher dimensions and unseen moduli without retraining.

A crypto VC firm, Paradigm, purchased the answer to the CIA's Kryptos sculpture puzzle for nearly a million dollars, taking over the role of verifying solutions.

Researchers found that RSA keys with heavily biased bits (mostly zeros) can be factored quickly using polynomial techniques, affecting keys from CompleteFTP and others. The study identifies hundreds of vulnerable keys and traces the bug to a type mismatch in big-integer code.

Encrypted Spaces is a research preview of an architecture for collaborative applications that ensures data is encrypted and operations are cryptographically verifiable, allowing servers to store data without being able to inspect plaintext. It includes a prototype sync engine and is developed with Microsoft Research and Harvard's Berkman Klein Center.

hax is a tool for translating Rust code into formal languages like F*, Rocq, and Lean for high-assurance verification.

A detailed historical and mathematical explanation of hash functions, from their invention by Arnold Dumey in 1956 as a memory indexing technique to modern cryptographic hashes, including Python implementations.

Evidence suggests the U.S. military has been using a hidden 176-bit slot in public GPS signals to broadcast encrypted cryptographic keys for nearly 20 years, effectively turning GPS satellites into global numbers stations.

rscrypto is a pure-Rust cryptography library that provides RSA, Ed25519, X25519, AEADs, hashes, KDFs, and more, with a focus on portability, no_std support, and industry-leading benchmarks.

Let's Encrypt announces plans to adopt Merkle Tree Certificates for post-quantum authentication, addressing the growing urgency to migrate to post-quantum signatures in the Web PKI.

Researchers at ETH Zurich have demonstrated a method for generating 'perfect randomness' using entangled superconducting qubits, a breakthrough with implications for cryptography and secure communications.

Reed is a lightweight specification for implementing prefix authentication schemes (transparency logs) that produces shorter proofs than traditional certificate transparency logs, superseding the earlier Bamboo specification with greater efficiency and flexibility.

The author explores encrypted reasoning blobs in LLM APIs from OpenAI and Anthropic, discussing how chain-of-thought data is encrypted and signed, and the security implications of tampering with those blocks.

A gentle introduction to lattice-based cryptography, covering foundations and potential use in post-quantum cryptography.

The CA/Browser Forum has voted to make ACME CAA extensions mandatory by March 2027, a key step toward strong cryptographic domain validation using DNSSEC.

Explains how Shamir's Secret Sharing works using geometric intuition, and mentions its use in Ente's Legacy Kit for secure secret recovery.

The article explores the concept of quantum jamming, a process that could break quantum cryptographic protocols, and discusses efforts to understand causality at a deeper level to ensure security even beyond quantum mechanics.

The author expands the 'don't roll your own crypto' principle to web development, arguing against custom implementations of scrolling, link navigation, text selection, and other browser-native behaviors.

Galois announces that SAW now supports generating Isabelle theories from Cryptol specifications, bridging the usability of Cryptol and SAW with the expressivity of interactive theorem provers like Isabelle, enabling semi-automated verification of cryptographic protocols.

Apple published formal verification methods and tools for their corecrypto library's quantum-secure algorithms ML-KEM and ML-DSA, providing mathematical proofs of correctness and releasing the implementations for independent evaluation.