H/T @quantamagazine.bsky.social

New Advances Bring the Era of Quantum Computers Closer Than Ever | Quanta Magazine Two research groups say they have significantly reduced the amount of qubits and time required to crack common online security technologies.

Still incremental improvements in #quantumcomputing theory, but could be important soon! www.quantamagazine.org/new-advances...

Why spies still use WW1-era encrypted radio broadcasts - ABC listen Short-wave radio enthusiasts have eagerly reported the appearance of Farsi-language encoded messages being broadcast out of Western Europe. The messages are being transmitted via number stations, which are radio broadcasts used by intelligence agencies to send encrypted messages to agents in the field. It is one of the oldest forms of clandestine communication, dating back to the first World War, and is still used by modern intelligence agencies today because they're almost impossible to decipher.

A very nice explanation on why #cryptography of one-time pad as used by the famous spy “number stations” still has some advantages over the modern digital methods

www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/sundayex...

Anonymous credentials: an illustrated primer This post has been on my back burner for well over a year. This has bothered me, since with every month that goes by, I become more convinced that anonymous authentication the most important topic …

Using #cryptography for anonymous ID verfification --- cool and useful! @matthewdgreen.bsky.social

blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/a...

You’re very welcome!

Fooled you, Daylight Savings Time! The hour you took from me last night was actually the hour I took when I fled Eastern Time the night before!

From @tenorfrank.bsky.social

Have you seen this: webpages.scu.edu/ftp/ffarris/...

Yubikeys using ML-DSA including ML-DSA-87 are coming!

#fractal #fractalart #fractalwork #fractalartwork #artwork #math #mathematics #maths

Not sure what phase of my life I’m in, but here’s that modelling balloon icosidodecahedron nobody asked for!

In theory it could be made out of a single modelling balloon, although in reality they don’t make balloons long enough :(

Shape nerds ASSEMBLE!

(In an icosahedral symmetry formation)

Connecting the Dots: An Investigative Study on Linking Private User Data Across Messaging Apps - NDSS Symposium View More Papers

Think your burner number keeps you anonymous? Kang et al. reveal a severe privacy threat, a cross-platform linking attack targeting messaging apps. Using contact discovery and SSO, it deanonymizes users and pinpoints their physical locations.

Today I was looking at an article on Multi-Party Threshold #Cryptography and wondered why "threshold" has only one h. Turns out the etymology is not "thresh-hold" at all, but "thresh-wold", possibly from the Middle English word "wold" meaning "forest". Mind blown.

For my next book, I’m reading some mid-20th century papers on color vision. These guys will go on for pages about the kind of filters they use, and then their discussion of the test subjects will be “we took the measurements on Mr. Perley G. Nutting, Jr., who sat still for a really long time.”

Love that paper!

At 26, during the Reign of Terror in France, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier narrowly avoided the guillotine. A decade later, he made a discovery that changed mathematics forever.
www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-the-...

Figure 6. The quotientope lattice for n = 4: all quotientopes ordered by inclusion (which corresponds to refinement of the lattice congruences). We only consider lattice congruences whose fan is essential. We have highlighted the cube (green), Loday’s associahedron [Lod04] (blue), another one of Hohlweg–Lange’s associahedra [HL07] (purple), the diagonal rectangulation polytope [LR12] (orange), and the permutahedron (red). Adapted from [PS19, Fig. 9].

This diagram should win some kind of prize for mathematical illustration. From arxiv.org/abs/2305.08471. 🧮

Looks like the Kryptos kerfuffle didn't hurt the auction much! #cryptography www.rrauction.com/auctions/lot...

So, the IACR held an election, but one of the three trustees lost their private key, which prevented them from verifying the results of the election. Forcing them to start over.

The cryptography association was foiled by key management.

hachyderm.io/@leak/110784...

picture of text. For this election and in accordance with the bylaws of the ACR, the three members of the ACR 2025 Election Committee acted as independent trustees, each holding a portion of the cryptographic key material required to jointly decrypt the results. This aspect of Helios' design ensures that no two trustees could collude to determine the outcome of an election or the contents of individual votes on their own: all trustees must provide their decryption shares. Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share. As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election.

This IACR election news is so relatable

Did you know?
Keccak is everywhere, quietly protecting real systems, such as:
• Connected devices checking data integrity
• Firmware updates verifying authenticity
• Embedded products securing messages
• PQC standards like ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA
⬇

“Key Management” is the cryptographic community’s version of “…it’s always DNS” International Association for Cryptologic Research runs secure vote and then loses the keys so nobody knows what the result is. As one commenter put it: “So a single member can collude to res…

“Key Management” is the cryptographic community’s version of “…it’s always DNS”
https://alecmuffett.com/article/126061
#cryptography #iacr

Post-Quantum Cryptography in .NET - .NET Blog What we've added for PQC, and how we got there.

Post-Quantum Cryptography in .NET

ift.tt/osS9nPf

#dotnet #pqc #cryptography #programming #csharp

This December, the Faculty of Engineering at #USyd is delighted to welcome Dr Moti Yung, who will speak at the Basser seminar series in our School. He will tell us about "Malicious Cryptography: beyond adhering to specifications in secure systems"

🕒 Tuesday, Dec 2
3:30—4:30pm

Physicists Take the Imaginary Numbers Out of Quantum Mechanics | Quanta Magazine Quantum mechanics has at last been formulated exclusively with real numbers, bringing a mathematical puzzle at the heart of the theory into a new era of inquiry.

Hot take: I hate to say it, but this is silly. Mathematicians have known for at least a century that you can replace imaginary numbers with 2x2 matrices of real numbers. Would the result be useful? Sounds like the answer is no. #quantumcomputing www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-t...

Well, that's a #cryptography oops. web.archive.org/web/20251016...

Doing some profile editing --- this should really be a pinned post, not my bio!

In his book The Mathematics of Secrets, Joshua Holden takes readers on a tour of the mathematics behind cryptography—the science of sending secret messages.

mathofsecrets.com