Claude Fable 5.1 solved a 370-year-old cipher in forty-four minutes. This tracks with what I wrote about AIs doing mathematics: It’s good at things that involve lots of searching and testing. [...]

Earlier this week, researchers outlined an attack that used a secret input provided by Microsoft 365 Copilot for enterprise to cause the AI assistant to exfiltrate a password present in the user’s inbox. Now, a separate team has devised a similar attack against Grok. The new data theft …

This is good : Post-quantum cryptography is now one pip-install away for the entire Python ecosystem. With funding from the Sovereign Tech Agency, we implemented support for ML-KEM, the NIST-standard key-establishment primitive, and ML-DSA, the NIST-standard digital-signature primitive, in pyca/cryptography. Remember, the reason to do this now is because …

Interesting research on a new class of weak RSA keys: keys with lots of zeros. It turns out that these keys are out in the wild. The badkeys project is an open-source service that checks public keys for known vulnerabilities. While developing this tool, Hanno collected a massive number …

The White House is drastically shortening the deadline for government agencies and organizations to adopt new quantum-resistant encryption systems that will withstand attacks that use quantum computers, as the federal government seeks to protect decades’ worth of secrets belonging to militaries, banks, governments, and most individuals on Earth. The …

As part of their 20th Anniversary celebration, Dark Reading asked five cybersecurity industry leaders who wrote blogs or columns for them over the years to select their favorite piece and share their reflections on the topic today. This is my section. Renowned technologist and author Bruce Schneier contributed a …

The Texas Attorney General has sued Meta over allegations that the company’s WhatsApp messenger, used by more than 3 billion people, doesn’t provide the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) it has long claimed. Since at least 2016, Meta (then named Facebook) has said WhatsApp provides robust end-to-end encryption, meaning …

A relatively new ransomware family is using a novel approach to hype the strength of the encryption used to scramble files—making, or at least claiming, that it is protected against attacks by quantum computers. Kyber, as the ransomware is called, has been around since at least last September …

Sometime around 2010, sophisticated malware known as Flame hijacked the mechanism that Microsoft used to distribute updates to millions of Windows computers around the world. The malware—reportedly jointly developed by the US and Israel—pushed a malicious update throughout an infected network belonging to the Iranian government. The …

Google says that it will fully transition to post-quantum cryptography by 2029. I think this is a good move, not because I think we will have a useful quantum computer anywhere near that year, but because crypto-agility is always a good thing. Slashdot thread. [...]

The Business of Secrets: Adventures in Selling Encryption Around the World by Fred Kinch (May 24, 2004) From the vantage point of today, it’s surreal reading about the commercial cryptography business in the 1970s. Nobody knew anything. The manufacturers didn’t know whether the cryptography they sold was …

Signal has just rolled out its quantum-safe cryptographic implementation. Ars Technica has a really good article with details: Ultimately, the architects settled on a creative solution. Rather than bolt KEM onto the existing double ratchet, they allowed it to remain more or less the same as it had been …

Two people found the solution. They used the power of research, not cryptanalysis, finding clues amongst the Sanborn papers at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. This comes as an awkward time, as Sanborn is auctioning off the solution. There were legal threats—I don’t understand their …

In our previous blog post (Part 1 of our key replication series), Automatically replicate your card payment keys across AWS Regions, we explored an event-driven, serverless architecture using AWS PrivateLink to securely replicate card payment keys across AWS Regions. That solution demonstrated how to build a custom replication framework …

RSA Conference (RSAC) 2025 drew 730 speakers, 650 exhibitors, and 44,000 attendees from across the globe to the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California from April 28 through May 1. The keynote lineup was eclectic, with 37 presentations featuring speakers ranging from NBA Hall of Famer Earvin “Magic …

On August 20, 2024, we announced the general availability of the new AWS CloudHSM instance type hsm2m.medium (hsm2). This new type comes with additional features compared to the previous AWS CloudHSM instance type, hsm1.medium (hsm1), such as support for Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-3 Level 3 …

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre just released its white paper on “Advanced Cryptography,” which it defines as “cryptographic techniques for processing encrypted data, providing enhanced functionality over and above that provided by traditional cryptography.” It includes things like homomorphic encryption, attribute-based encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, and secure multiparty …

This is a truly fascinating paper: “ Trusted Machine Learning Models Unlock Private Inference for Problems Currently Infeasible with Cryptography.” The basic idea is that AIs can act as trusted third parties: Abstract: We often interact with untrusted parties. Prioritization of privacy can limit the effectiveness of these interactions, as …

The UK’s National Computer Security Center (part of GCHQ) released a timeline —also see their blog post —for migration to quantum-computer-resistant cryptography. It even made The Guardian. [...]

Interesting article —with photos!—of the US/UK “Combined Cipher Machine” from WWII. [...]

Interesting research: “ How to Securely Implement Cryptography in Deep Neural Networks.” Abstract: The wide adoption of deep neural networks (DNNs) raises the question of how can we equip them with a desired cryptographic functionality (e.g, to decrypt an encrypted input, to verify that this input is authorized, or …