‘They singled out non-white, foreign-born workers’: the restaurants raided by Britain’s version of ICE They’re not armed and they keep a relatively low profile. But the Home Office’s immigration compliance and enforcement officers have searched thousands of business in pursuit of illegal workers. Are t...

‘They singled out non-white, foreign-born workers’: the restaurants raided by Britain’s version of ICE

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Fabio is looking for a PhD student in "Explainable, Knowledge-driven AI and ML for Systems Security" fabio.pierazzi.com/opportunity/...

Screenshot of the program of CAW from https://caw.cryptanalysis.fun/.

The program for our Eurocrypt affiliated event CAW on May 10 is (mostly) finalized and published on: caw.cryptanalysis.fun

We received many super exciting submissions!

To register, select our workshop during conference registration on the Eurocrypt website once that opens: eurocrypt.iacr.org/2026/

.@nadim.computer is looking for an intern: symbolic.software/blog/2026-03...

Not Safe for Politics: Cellebrite Used on Kenyan Activist and Politician Boniface Mwangi - The Citizen Lab Following the widely-condemned arrest in July 2025 of prominent Kenyan opposition voice Boniface Mwangi, the Citizen Lab analyzed artefacts from devices seized during the arrest. We found that Cellebr...

Not Safe for Politics Cellebrite Used on Kenyan Activist and Politician Boniface Mwangi

citizenlab.ca/research/cel...

'deep hanging out' (technical term)

#realworldccrypto

"Cryptography is also a social science unaware of itself."

#realworldcrypto

Just finished presenting this work at Real World Crypto in Taipei :)

TL;DR: We found 2 attacks on Signal (Android, Desktop) where a malicious server can inject messages in conversations.

Super fun project! Thanks a bunch to Noemi Terzo, @kennyog.bsky.social, and @cryptojedi.bsky.social

Equipping Lebanon's First Responders 2026 March 2026: We are fundraising to equip Lebanon’s national first responders - The Civil Defense (الدفاع المدني) with essential and life-saving supp

I just donated to help equip Lebanon's first responders and firefighters with essential life-saving supplies to help them deal with the massive crises unfolding due to Israeli attacks on civilian areas.

Please consider donating: fundahope.com/en/campaigns...

Fernando is looking for a PhD student www.iacr.org/jobs/item/4164 Fernando is excellent, you should consider applying.

"presenting a cornucopia of practical attacks".

These are my favorite words ever to have occurred in a cryptography paper.

A thread in which @sockpuppet.org presents some of the juiciest morsels from our paper at zkae.io :

“Based on these ethnographic findings, we initiate the cryptographic study of at-compromise security”

martinralbrecht.wordpress.com/2026/02/17/b...

Abstract. We initiate the study of basing the hardness of hinted ISIS problems (i.e. with trapdoor information, or ‘hints’) on the previously conjectured space-time hardness of lattice problems without hints. We present two main results. 1. If there exists an efficient algorithm for hinted ISIS that outputs solutions a constant factor longer than the hints, then there exists a single-exponential time and polynomial memory zero-centred spherical Gaussian sampler solving hinted SIS with norm a constant factor shorter than the hints. 2. Assume the existence of a chain of algorithms for hinted ISIS each taking as input Gaussian hints whose norms decrease by a constant factor at each step in the chain, then there exists a single-exponential time and polynomial memory algorithm for SIS with norm a quasilinear factor from optimal. The existence of such hinted ISIS solvers implies single-exponential time and polynomial memory algorithms for worst-case lattice problems, contradicting a conjecture by Lombardi and Vaikuntanathan (CRYPTO’20) and all known algorithms. This suggests that hinted ISIS is hard. Apart from advancing our understanding of hinted lattice problems, an immediate consequence is that signing the same message twice in GPV-style [Gentry–Peikert–Vaikuntanathan, STOC’08] schemes (without salting or derandomisation) likely does not compromise unforgeability. Also, cryptanalytic attempts on the One-More-ISIS problem [Agrawal–Kirshanova–Stehlé-Yadav, CCS’22] likely will need to overcome the conjectured space-time hardness of lattices.

Image showing part 2 of abstract.

Hardness of hinted ISIS from the space-time hardness of lattice problems (Martin R. Albrecht, Russell W. F. Lai, Eamonn W. Postlethwaite) ia.cr/2026/187

Inside Reform’s plans for a fascist takeover In today's article shado editor Elia Ayoub discusses Reform’s “Operation Restore Justice”, the risks of a British ICE and how we can resist.

Apropos of nothing, here's a piece on Reform's plans for a British ICE: shado-mag.com/articles/opi...

Here's the policy document: web.archive.org/web/20260127...

Here's a piece on the Labour Government's practice of emulating the US' celebration of brutality: www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Isn't it the IACR via Kevin eprint-admin@iacr.org?

ICE is full of COWARDS. They are all absolute, pathetic, untrained COWARDS. DEFUND AND PROSECUTE. YouTube video by Seth Moulton

This is right. This is the message. This is the urgency.

Minneapolis and so many other places are living under paramilitary occupation and tyranny by out of control, unaccountable federal thugs. This cannot stand.

www.youtube.com/shorts/hyqtA...

We're hosting an Autumn School in London, UK, from 15 to 17 September 2026, to bring together ethnographers and cryptographers to discuss ways in which the two fields can be meaningfully brought into conversation. This is also the premise of our Social Foundations of Cryptography project: to ground cryptography in ethnography. Here, we rely on ethnographic methods, rather than our intuition, to surface security notions that we then formalise and sometimes realise using cryptography. Our intention is to 'flip' the typical relationship between the computer and social sciences, where the latter has traditionally ended up in a service role to the former. Rather, we want to put cryptography at the mercy of ethnography. But how do we do this? How do we as cryptographers interact with and make sense of ethnographic field data? How can we refine, improve or extend this interaction? What obstacles do we face when we make cryptography rely on ethnographic data which is inherently 'messy'? How do we handle that cryptographic notions tend to require some form of generalisation but ethnographic findings can only be particular? How do ethnographers retain the richness of ethnographic field data in conversations with cryptographic work? Indeed, our project has already highlighted some limitations of our approach. It has brought to the fore concrete challenges in 'letting the ethnographic data speak' while still making it speak to cryptography. The Autumn School is an opportunity to explore these questions jointly across ethnography and cryptography, through a series of talks, group discussions and activities. We say a bit more about the programme and registration for the Autumn School here.

Social Foundations of Cryptography: Autumn School
London, UK | 15 to 17 September 2026
social-foundations-of-cryptography.gitlab.io/school

Lecturer (≅ Assistant Professor/Juniorprofessor/Maître de conférences) in Cryptography at King’s College London 2026 We are looking to recruit a lecturer in cryptography at King’s College London to work with us within the cybersecurity group: I think it’s fair to say we got strong expertise in lattice-based and p…

Come work with us!

Lecturer (≅ Assistant Professor/Juniorprofessor/Maître de conférences) in Cryptography at King’s College London

martinralbrecht.wordpress.com/2026/01/05/l...

On Incomputable Language: An Essay on AI An incidental consequence of having written a book on tech-fascism and the so-called rationalist movement is that I find myself periodically queried for my thoughts on artificial intelligence. On the ...

There is a lot to be appreciated about someone with an actual humanities education and a capacity to think writing about AGI. www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/on-inco... by @eruditorumpress.com

And now we are famous: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/w... - congratulations to all colleagues who made the NYT (both through quotes, by playing a role, or by being on this picture)

Pressure prompts universities to revise EDI recruitment ads Universities change job requirements after free speech groups raise concerns following new legislation

Two stories from King's College London:

1/ A student is at risk of losing their visa over their Palestine activism www.cage.ngo/articles/leg...

2/ Equality, Diversity and Inclusion removed from job ads: www.timeshighereducation.com/news/pressur...

Does that remind you of anything?

You may think of a mode of operation as a way of constructing an encryption algorithm from a PRP. So, in particular: "AES" is not an encryption algorithm but "AES-GCM" is an encryption algorithm (achieving IND-CCA security).
Similarly, "RSA" is not an encryption algorithm, but "RSA-OAEP" is.

Sorry for being so opaque! AES is a block cipher which is modelled as pseudorandom permutation (PRP) or a strong pseudorandom permutation (SPRP). The usual way you are taught that these are not encryption schemes is: "the penguin", see Example 2 in malb.io/7CCSMATC/lec...

I believe the big pioneer here was Allan Steel magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/users/allan/

Yup, Magma, LinBox, M4RI(E) et al are all running Strassen in dimensions of the hundreds or thousands linalg.org github.com/malb/m4ri but last time I checked this is a no go for floating point matrices due to numerical stability issues with the asymptotically fast algorithms.

Go ask a room full of cryptography-adjacent practitioners if "AES" or "RSA" are encryption algorithms, I bet you'll hear a lot of "yes" (at least that was the outcome for me today). How many university modules even teach that falsehood? What a failure of our field.

I was today's years old when I realised that "we" give developers an object called the Advanced Encryption Standard which is not an encryption algorithm (but a pseudorandom permutation) and then we are shocked when we encounter yet another ECB mode in the wild. 🙃

The Discord Hack is Every User’s Worst Nightmare A hack impacting Discord’s age verification process shows in stark terms the risk of tech companies collecting users’ ID documents. Now the hackers are posting peoples’ IDs and other sensitive informa...

Discord user IDs getting leaked is the entirely predictable consequence of requiring platforms to do age verification. That data never goes away, it spreads. In this case, into appeals in a breached customer support database. And predictably, it can get worse. www.404media.co/the-discord-...

Update on a Security Incident Involving Third-Party Customer Service | Discord At Discord, protecting the privacy and security of our users is a top priority. That’s why it’s important to us that we’re transparent with them about events that impact their personal information.

So, Discord implemented true ID age verification and this turned into a privacy disaster, am I reading this right?

discord.com/press-releas...