Watching remotely? You can follow Real World Crypto 2026 on YouTube livestreams (also available via the website):
Day 1 (Mar 9): youtube.com/live/QQhyxFj...
Day 2 (Mar 10): youtube.com/live/00zvMSW...
Day 3 (Mar 11): youtube.com/live/v_AFtbW...
If you liked this experiment, I published a full piece today in the same vein: a text that gets 100 years older with every section, from a modern blog post to a medieval chronicle.
It's a single story spanning 1000 years of English. See how far you get.
www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...
The IACR board sent a survey to members last year, and it took us a while to analyze the results and publish findings. You can see them at iacr.org/surveyresults/
Person: say, i am alive. Computer: I am alive. Person: oh my god.
interesting read, didn't know that STOC 2026 conducted an experiment on optional AI-generated reviews
gpg.fail
At the gpg.fail talk and omg #39c3
You can just put a \0 in the Hash: header and then newlines and inject text in a cleartext message.
Wonβt even blame PGP here. C is unsafe at any speed.
gpg has not fixed it yet.
The accepted talks for Real World Crypto 2026 are now online: rwc.iacr.org/2026/accepte...
Thanks to everyone who submitted, and we look forward to the discussions at the symposium.
Interesting read
lawrencecpaulson.github.io//2025/12/05/...
Made a site comparing the sizes of living things :)
The great Julius Csotonyi spent 5 months painting over 60 illustrations for the site, no ai used
> neal.fun/size-of-life/
Happy to announce the posting of
D1.1 Survey of PQC algorithms
D1.3 Hot Topics and Open Problems in Post-Quantum Cryptography
D2.1 Survey of PQC protocols
pqcsa.eu/deliverables...
There are no formally approved deliverables, yet. These drafts are provided as is for the interest of the community.
We take a look at hash-based schemes, and how they fit in Bitcoin. The paper gives a broad overview of different schemes, including SPHINCS+ and several recent modification. For readers seeking a gentle introduction to hash-based schemes, we hope this work offers a helpful starting point.
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!
This Humble Bundle has a lot of really good hacking books from No Starch Press, and it supports EFF! Get it!
How many cryptographers are does it take to run a successful election?
N+1 where N is the numbers of shareholders needed to decrypt and 1 with backups of the keys "just in case"
#DecryptTencrede
The call for talks for CAW 2026 (a workshop affiliated with Eurocrypt) is out!
This year's motto is "cryptography under real-world constraints and threat models", but other applied cryptography is also very welcome.
All info is on: caw.cryptanalysis.fun.
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishersβ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authorsβ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in βossificationβ, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchersβ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices β such as reading, reflecting and engaging with othersβ contributions β is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.
A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:
a 𧡠1/n
Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
arXiv CS category has stopped accepting review articles and position papers (e.g., SoK) unless they have been peer-reviewed
blog.arxiv.org/2025/10/31/a...
Anonymous credentials are going to have a big year. In the realm of "fancy" cryptography, they're perhaps the most important primitive we'll need to make PQ. Where do we stand? Lena Heimberger spent part of the summer finding out.
blog.cloudflare.com/pq-anonymous...
Researchers pointed a satellite dish at the sky for 3 years and monitored what unencrypted data it picked up. The results were shocking: They obtained thousands of T-Mobile users' phone calls and texts, military and law enforcement secrets, much more: www.wired.com/story/satell... π§΅π
In 2023, Signal was the first mainstream messenger to enable post-quantum cryptography. Weβre still ahead of the (elliptical) curve, implementing a new hybrid PQ ratchet ensuring Forward Secrecy & Post-Compromise Security even in a post-quantum world. signal.org/blog/spqr/
Abstract. We present a formally-verified (in Lean 4) framework for translating symbolic cryptographic proofs into the computationally-sound ones. Symbolic cryptography is a well-established field that allows reasoning about cryptographic protocols in an abstract way and is relatively easy to verify using proof assistants. Unfortunately, Β it often lacks a connection to the computational aspects of real-world cryptography. Computationally-sound cryptography, on the other hand, captures this connection much better, but it is often more complex, less accessible, and much harder to verify formally. Several works in the past have provided a bridge between the two, but, to our knowledge, none of them have been implemented in a proof assistant. We close this gap by formalizing the translation from symbolic to computationally-sound cryptography in Lean 4. Our framework is based on the work of Micciancio (Eurocrypt, 2010) and Li and Micciancio (CSF, 2018), which builds on the idea of using co-induction (instead of induction) for reasoning about an adversaryβs knowledge in a symbolic setting. Our work encompasses (1) the formalization of the symbolic cryptography framework, (2) the formalization of the computationally sound cryptography framework, and (3) the formalization of the translation between the two. We also provide (4) an extended example of circuit garbling, which is a well-known cryptographic protocol frequently used in secure multi-party computation. We believe that our work will serve as a foundation for future research in the area of formal verification of cryptographic protocols, as it enables reasoning about cryptographic protocols more abstractly while still providing a formally verified connection to the computational aspects of real-world cryptography.
Image showing part 2 of abstract.
Computationally-Sound Symbolic Cryptography in Lean (Stefan Dziembowski, Grzegorz FabiaΕski, Daniele Micciancio, RafaΕ StefaΕski) ia.cr/2025/1700
Another update: someone claims to have fixed the bug!
Not sure this level is possible though
Stuck at level 44, not good at chess π₯²
Super cool!
The Call for Contributed Talks is now open for RWC 2026! And the deadline for submissions is now Oct. 10, 2025.
rwc.iacr.org/2026/contrib...
Agreed, yeah also understandable from a purely academic point of view
