I’m coming down from spending a few days at Usenix Security, right here in Baltimore. This means that my days have been taken up with two kinds of conversation: first, explaining to colleagues why Baltimore isn’t actually like The Wire. And second: trying not to talk about AI. Here I’m going to brea...

Yesterday Anthropic published two new cryptanalysis results, both outputs of Claude Mythos, their (still) unreleased advanced model. The first of these results attacks a signature scheme called HAWK, while the second is an improved attack against reduced-round AES. Anthropic also released a blog pos...

Yesterday Apple announced a big step towards deploying real AI in their Siri ecosystem. The deal describes a partnership with Google to inject that company’s advanced LLM models into Siri. In some ways this is good and inevitable: Siri is one of the world’s most preeminent voice agents, and it would...

This is a quick post I wanted to write about a “hobby project” I spent a weekend on. It has little to do with real cryptography, and mostly doesn’t expose a particularly exciting vulnerability. But it did teach me a lot about frontier LLM APIs and coding agents. It also got me certified as an … Cont...

This is the second in a series of posts about anonymous credentials. You can find this first part here. In the previous post, we introduced the notion of anonymous credentials as a technique that allows users to authenticate to a website without sacrificing their privacy. As a quick reminder, an ano...

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 we could be talking about as cryptographers. This isn’t just because I love neat cryptography: it’s tha...

It’s not every day that we see mainstream media get excited about encryption apps! For that reason, the past several days have been fascinating, since we’ve been given not one but several unusual stories about the encryption used in WhatsApp. Or more accurately, if you read the story, a pretty wild ...

I learn about cryptographic vulnerabilities all the time, and they generally fill me with some combination of jealousy (“oh, why didn’t I think of that”) or else they impress me with the brilliance of their inventors. But there’s also another class of vulnerabilities: these are the ones that can’t p...

Update 6/10: Based on a short conversation with an engineering lead at X, some of the devices used at X are claimed to be using HSMs. See more further below. Matthew Garrett has a nice post about Twitter (uh, X)’s new end-to-end encryption messaging protocol, which is now called XChat. The TL;DR of ...

This is a cryptography blog and I always feel the need to apologize for any post that isn’t “straight cryptography.” I’m actually getting a little tired of apologizing for it (though if you want some hard-core cryptography content, there’s plenty here and here.) Sometimes I have to remind my colleag...

Two weeks ago, the Washington Post reported that the U.K. government had issued a secret order to Apple demanding that the company include a “backdoor” into the company’s end-to-end encrypted iCloud Backup feature. From the article: The British government’s undisclosed order, issued last month, requ...

This is the third and penultimate post in a series about theoretical weaknesses in Fiat-Shamir as applied to proof systems. The first post is here, the second post is here, and you should probably read them. Over the past two posts I’ve given a bit of background on four subjects: (1) interactive pro...

I’m supposed to be finishing a wonky series on proof systems (here and here) and I promise I will do that this week. In the midst of this I’ve been a bit distracted by world events. Last week the Washington Post published a bombshell story announcing that the U.K. had filed “technical capability not...

This is the second part of a two three four-part series, which covers some recent results on “verifiable computation” and possible pitfalls that could occur there. This post won’t make much sense on its own, so I urge you to start with the first part. In the previous post we introduced a handful of ...

Trigger warning: incredibly wonky theoretical cryptography post (written by a non-theorist)! Also, this will be in two parts. I plan to be back with some more thoughts on practical stuff, like cloud backup, in the near future. If you’ve read my blog over the years, you should understand that I have ...