🗂️ Other170

Interconnects post in which Nathan Lambert revisits his claim that an open-weight release of Claude Mythos in April 2026 would have been survivable. He argues GLM-5.3 already crosses that capability threshold with little visible harm. He cites Epoch AI's GLM-5.3 Firefox file-exfiltration exploit and Joshua Saxe's trend data, and says recent vulnerability waves come mostly from closed models and general AI diffusion.

interconnects.aiarticlePublished and added 30 Oct 2026

Rekt News piece tracing three AI-security headlines back to their sources. It covers Justin Drake's October 2026 "bunker mode" warning about AI breaking ECDSA, OpenAI's report of a model spending Sepolia test ETH from a default developer mnemonic, and Wiz's "70% of the Internet" claim for PHP CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. It closes with four questions for checking a claim.

rekt.newsarticleAdded 29 Oct 2026

Socket reports on a GitHub issue for OpenCode, opened 28 June, describing a bypass of per-IP usage limits on its free hosted models by switching VPN addresses. The reporter first proposed account-based limits, then reopened the issue in August to promote the workaround and claimed to run 130 agents. After the thread drew harassment and was deleted in October 2026, it is unclear whether OpenCode fixed the bypass.

socket.devarticlePublished and added 29 Oct 2026

SecurityWeek roundup of patches from Adobe, Veeam and Juniper Networks covering over three dozen vulnerabilities. Adobe fixed 12 flaws (eight critical in Campaign Classic), Veeam fixed nine (including a cross-tenant RCE in Backup for Microsoft 365), and Juniper fixed 18 in Session Smart Router and Conductor. None were reported exploited. Juniper said CVE-2026-109618 (PHP2Shell) affects Junos OS but is not exploitable there.

securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 29 Oct 2026

Chrome 156 and Firefox 159 security updates fix over 200 vulnerabilities. Chrome 156 patches 52 flaws, four critical, including CVE-2026-118306, a FileSystem memory corruption bug that allows code execution outside the sandbox via a crafted HTML page. Firefox 159 fixes 167 flaws, 108 high severity, mostly use-after-free, plus Thunderbird and ESR releases. No in-the-wild exploitation is reported.

securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 28 Oct 2026

Shor's algorithm compiled on cat qubits is an IACR ePrint (2026/2665) giving an end-to-end resource estimate on superconducting cat qubits, using repetition and LDPC cat codes. Factoring RSA-2048 needs about 23,000 cat qubits and 3.14 days, assuming phase-flip noise p_Z = 5e-4 and no bit-flips. secp256k1 ECDLP needs at most 30,000 qubits and 1 hour. A space-for-time trade runs RSA-2048 in 1.25 hours on about 611,000 qubits.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 28 Oct 2026

Beyond the Event Horizon of Keccak extends a 2011 observation that a path in the Keccak sponge from a zero-capacity state back to one yields infinite second-preimage families. Three theorems cover loops from any capacity value x, k-block loops and cycles, and Joux-style multicollisions with search cost independent of k. Verified examples run on Keccak-f[200] and Keccak-f[1600] with c=32; it also proposes bridge-based protocols.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 28 Oct 2026

Akamai SIG argues that vendors and researchers broke embargo norms during the October 2026 PHP2Shell leak, when the PHP fix shipped a day early on 21 October. It explains the four TLP 2.0 labels, tabulates past embargo breaks (Heartbleed, a collapsed six-month kernel-era embargo, the Alibaba Cloud and MIIT case), and lists seven practices, such as no proofs of concept or CVE numbers before the fix.

akamai.comarticleAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026

Radical isogenies on every model is an IACR ePrint paper by Thomas Decru (October 2026). It gives radical isogeny steps of every odd degree N directly on short Weierstrass, Montgomery, twisted Edwards, Huff, Jacobi quartic, twisted Hessian, Legendre and Jacobi intersection curves, plus Kummer lines. In Tate normal form a step drops from 12.5N to 10N multiplications. Montgomery and twisted Edwards curves cost 10.5N+O(1) per step and 2N to push a point. All algorithms are inversion-free, with exact operation counts.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026

Cloudflare's Q3 2026 review of the 49 Internet disruptions seen by Cloudflare Radar between July and September 2026. Government-directed shutdowns led with 19 (18 exam shutdowns in Iraq), followed by 14 power outages and 5 natural disasters. It gives traffic-drop figures and durations for Cuba, Honduras, Ukraine, Guam, Colombia, Ethiopia's Tigray region and others, including a Honduran interconnection facility power failure that cut HTTP traffic 63%.

blog.cloudflare.comarticleAdded 29 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026

Apple's 27.2 releases fix 286 vulnerabilities across iOS/iPadOS (163) and macOS Golden Gate (263), with memory corruption in WebKit and the kernel, sandbox escapes, Gatekeeper bypasses and a remote code execution bug in Remote Management. iOS and iPadOS 18.7.11 backport the fix for CVE-2026-86950, an exploited zero-day found by Meta's product security team and first patched in 26.7.1. Patch counts for tvOS, watchOS, visionOS, Safari and the 26.7.2 and Sequoia 15.8.2 releases are also listed.

securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 27 Oct 2026

This SecurityWeek commentary covers the September 2026 Citrix NetScaler ADC and Gateway zero-days, exploited from mid-month and patched on 27 September as unauthenticated RCE flaws CVE-2026-88771 through CVE-2026-88778. The author argues the fast response shows stronger defence. Cited evidence: Citrix disclosure time fell from about 40 days to 17 in 2026 after it set up a NetScaler CNA, and CISA made a rare Sunday KEV addition.

securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 27 Oct 2026

AlgOssa is a decentralized secure aggregation protocol built on Ossa, a generic committee-aided, single-server construction for one-shot clients (following OPA and Willow, CRYPTO 2025). Ossa realizes secure aggregation with non-selective abort against a malicious server. AlgOssa adds Algorand-style sortition to rotate leaders and committees, bounds the chance of an honest server, and gives eventual delivery. Classical and post-quantum routes are evaluated.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026

Firedancer, the Solana validator client built by Jump Crypto, now requires researchers to burn 1 SOL (about $100) per bug report, nonrefundable. A $1 million audit contest from 9 April to 9 May 2026 drew 809 reports from 162 researchers but only 127 unique findings, and nearly half of valid reports were duplicates. Rewards are doubled through 20 November, with Alpenglow criticals up to $300,000.

coindesk.comarticlePublished and added 27 Oct 2026

Inventory of post-quantum migration work for Ethereum consensus-layer networking, by adust09 of Nyx Foundation. It maps three targets: Discovery v5/ENR signatures and key exchange, TLS 1.3 key agreement in QUIC, and libp2p TLS identity binding and CertificateVerify. It covers the 300-byte ENR and 1,280-byte packet limits, why hybrid KEMs do not authenticate peers, and downgrade and DoS concerns. It selects no algorithm or schedule.

ethresear.charticlePublished and added 27 Oct 2026

Blue Initiative is a free public vulnerability database for maritime IT and OT, built by Cydome, ClassNK, Bureau Veritas, MTS-ISAC and Rakuten Maritime. It holds nearly 30,000 entries, over 2,000 rated critical by CVSS and more than 580 known exploited. Only 37 affect ship and port products. Most entries are pulled from CISA ICS advisories and the KEV catalog and mapped to maritime systems.

securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 27 Oct 2026

Measurement study of 23,102 third-party Discord bots and 183,142 user reviews (2021-2026, 49 languages). A fine-tuned DeBERTa classifier plus manual validation yields 8,832 security and privacy reviews, mapped to a 31-theme taxonomy; Data Sharing (30.5%) and Data Collection (16.2%) dominate. Permission count and admin status correlate only weakly with user concerns. The authors build BotLens, an MCP-server auditing framework with six tools.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026

ZMAC+ is a tweakable-block-cipher MAC (List and Nandi, ToSC 2017) with claimed beyond-birthday-bound security. This ePrint paper (2026/2647) shows a tag-swap attack: for two-block tags, a distinguisher and a fresh-message forgery with constant success probability using O(2^{n/2}) queries in the ideal-TBC model. It also corrects a counting error in the published Lemma 4 and proposes a repaired variant with an adaptive PRF bound of order q^2/2^{n+min(n,t)}.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 26 Oct 2026

Cryptology ePrint 2026/2642 presents a plaintext-recovery attack on the DBDH and CBDH variants of the Datta, Komargodski and Waters multi-authority ABE for NC1 (Journal of Cryptology, 2023). It needs one corrupt authority and two users, and succeeds with probability one in the static model. The flaw is an invalid extension of the Rouselakis-Waters LSSS matrix-normalization lemma. The paper also attacks two Datta-Pal (PKC 2023) attribute-based inner-product schemes and proves repaired versions secure in the random oracle model.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 26 Oct 2026

A Memory-efficient Implementation of Wiedemann XL is an ePrint paper (2026/2641) giving the first efficient on-the-fly implementation of XL with block Wiedemann for the multivariate quadratic problem. It builds on the CCNY SSE implementation, removes column-index tables, and computes column indices with O(n^2) instead of O(n^3) look-ups. It runs in comparable BW1 time with up to five times less memory, and an AVX2 port covers F256, the main field of UOV.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 26 Oct 2026

Subexponential Algorithms for LWE via Rejection Sampling on Superlattices is an ePrint paper by Ligeng Fan, Changpeng Shao, Hongbo Li and Dingkang Wang. It extends the Ducas, Engelberts and Loyer superlattice framework to give a provable classical search-LWE algorithm for prime q in [n^2, 2n^2], using m=4n samples and time and space exp(O(n/ln ln n)). A second variant runs in 2^((1/2+o(1))n/ln R) for general parameters. It resolves a gap left by Kirchner and Fouque.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 26 Oct 2026

SynTrace is a single-round compiler that adds accountability to linear private information retrieval (PIR). The client mixes the retrieval query with m audit queries, so audit syndromes identify up to d deviating servers among t colluding ones before reconstruction. The paper proves perfect query privacy and zero false identification within the threshold. For Shamir-based PIR it needs k=t+d+1 servers. For a 32 KiB record from a 1 GiB database it uses 2.25 MiB, against 8.96 MiB for the Eriguchi, Kurosawa and Nuida (TCC 2022) homomorphic-MAC construction.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 26 Oct 2026

Anis Bkakria's ePrint 2026/2638 gives polynomial-time decision attacks on Known-Covariance Ring-LWE (KCov-RLWE), the assumption Micciancio and Suhl introduced for simulation-secure threshold encryption. The public sample and covariance hint form a bordered Gram matrix whose determinant leaks a residual that differs between real and uniform samples. The attacks cover broad prime-modulus families at ring rank one and transfer to composite moduli with an odd prime divisor. Power-of-two moduli are not covered, and the paper does not break the full threshold-encryption scheme.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026

Philippe Gaborit proves that maximum-likelihood decoding of Gabidulin codes is NP-hard even for dimension one: deciding rank distance at most n-2 from the code {λg} is NP-complete. The reduction is deterministic, so Rank Syndrome Decoding and Rank Minimum Distance for F_{q^m}-linear codes are NP-complete under deterministic reductions, where the earlier reduction was randomized. It goes through a new pivot problem, Twisted Square Membership.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026

Revisiting AES Key Wrap is an ePrint paper (2026/2636) by John Preuß Mattsson, expanded from technical comments to NIST on the SP 800-38F revision. It shows the stated forgery probabilities ignore adaptive attacks and gives corrected bounds for KW, KWP and TKW. It also shows KW lacks beyond-birthday-bound security, since a forgery leaks a plaintext prefix and an encryption-only distinguisher exists.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026

Falko Strenzke's ePrint 2026/2635 presents a multi-target second-preimage attack on message hashing in HSS/LMS and XMSS with SHA-256 and SHA-256/192. It herds chaining states from many collected signatures into one state, defeating the key and leaf-index prefix. With 2^64 signatures, SHA-256 cost falls from 2^256 to about 2^166 (2^156 at maximal message length). SHAKE256 parameter sets are unaffected.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026

Interconnects podcast with Nathan Lambert and Florian Brand on Kimi K3.1 Pro and the AI cyber landscape. Kimi says it down-weighted cyber data in mid-training so its open weights do not extend offensive capability. They discuss the PHP2Shell remote code execution bug, the repeat LiteLLM compromise from an API key left in GitHub for five months, abliterated model APIs, and trusted-access programs from OpenAI and Anthropic. The transcript was truncated at the very end.

interconnects.aitalkPublished and added 25 Oct 2026

Anil Kumar Pradhan's October 2026 ePrint rebuts the Olejnik and Naskrecki (2026) key-recovery and plaintext-recovery attack on the Pradhan CRT-RLWE fully homomorphic encryption scheme. It argues the attack works only because the chosen error distribution lies in the kernel of the CRT encoding, which makes the effective error zero. It also argues that the intended centered-binomial errors make that event negligible at the reported parameters. This is the author's own response, not independent verification.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026

This IACR ePrint 2026/2632 paper by Demirtaş and Yayla analyses the Crites–Stewart adaptive forgery attack on threshold Schnorr signatures, which needs one call to a sparse linear search oracle (bounded distance decoding of a scaled Reed–Solomon code). It shows that choosing the commitment coefficient vector does not help much: a wrapper adversary with Q challenges succeeds with probability at most QM/p, even if its solvers decode every witness for free. For the six original (N, τ) pairs, M stays below 2^24, so the bound is under 2^-100 after 2^128 challenges at p = 2^252.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026

VeilDNS is a DNS-native protocol that uses a post-quantum KEM and AEAD to encrypt DNS questions and answers and authenticate the resolver in one UDP exchange on port 53, preserving the DNS wire format. It has stateless and stateful modes plus optional forward secrecy from the second query. Against ML-DSA-authenticated DoT/DoH/DoQ it reports up to 3.5x higher cold-session throughput and 13.7x fewer bytes; Tamarin proves query confidentiality, response authentication and forward secrecy.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026

The Exact Bit Security of Hash-Based Signatures is a 2026 IACR ePrint paper that analyses XMSS with 128-bit digests and SLH-DSA-128s in the random oracle model, with proofs formalised in Lean4. Strong unforgeability comes to 127 bits under most accounting modes but only 122 bits if just direct random oracle queries are counted. The authors give matching attacks, and show how resource accounting changes the result.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026

Provable Security of SHA-256-Based LMS Revisited in the Ideal-Cipher Model is an October 2026 ePrint paper by Chun Guo, Hao Cheng, Bart Preneel and Meiqin Wang. It shows forgery attacks on LMS_SHA256_M32 and LMS_SHA256_M24 that exploit Merkle-Damgård structure, so the Katz and Fluhrer random-oracle bounds do not apply. It proves ideal-cipher-model bounds: about 256 minus log2 of the block count for M32, and a minimum of two terms for M24.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026

Gao and Hu's IACR ePrint 2026/2622 shows that if the matrix multiplication exponent satisfies ω ≤ 9/4 − η, heuristic lattice sieving runs in (3/2 − δ)^(n/2+o(n)) time under the spherical heuristic from the BDGL analysis. It builds on OpenAI's recent result that ω ≤ 9/4. With known matrix multiplication algorithms, the method already gives subquadratic search inside BDGL buckets. Only the abstract is available, so concrete parameters are not shown.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026

The paper formalizes elliptic-curve semiprimality certificates by adapting the Goldwasser-Kilian primality criterion. For certificates built with complex multiplication, a norm-lattice reconstruction factors N from (N, S, D) alone in expected polynomial time. The author uses it, plus public-point and quadratic-twist attacks, to factor Reble's 1084-digit and Broadhurst's 5061-digit moduli, and shows that hidden-cofactor, withheld-CM-map and private-isogeny repairs also fail.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026

Bankless article on how crypto is responding to AI-driven bug discovery. It cites Bitcoin Core's 22 October 2026 policy change to fix and ship bugs findable with a simple LLM prompt instead of embargoing them, DefiLlama's 112 hacks over $1M in 2026 versus 70 in 2025, and the Initia exploit (~$2.7M). It contrasts an agility approach (Starknet, bunker mode) with minimalism and AI-assisted formal verification (Anthropic and Theorem proofs across 123 libraries).

bankless.comarticlePublished and added 23 Oct 2026

Rentaro Shiba and Tetsu Iwata prove a tight multi-key security bound for the FX construction (the DESX generalization) in the quantum ideal cipher model. Security holds up to about 2^((n+κ)/3) total classical and quantum oracle queries against fully adaptive adversaries, for any number of keyed instances μ≥1. This improves their ToSC 2026 bound and matches the offline Simon's algorithm attack in the exponent.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026

Learning with Quantization and Worst Case Lattice Problems is an IACR ePrint paper (2026/2613) by Ziwei Hong and Zhongqiu Fang. It proves that search and decision learning with quantization (LWQ) with public dither is as hard as quantum GapSVP and SIVP on arbitrary lattices, using the randomized polar lattice quantizer of Lyu et al. It also shows that a complete reduction for interval uniform error LWE (MAMBA Frost) and hardness at concrete MAMBA parameters are not established.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026

Pairwise Independence of Ten-Round AES (Zhongfeng Niu, Kai Hu, ePrint 2026/2608) proves that ten rounds of AES with independent uniform round keys and input/output whitening are within 3017/2^141 (below 2^-129) statistical distance of pairwise independent. The proof bounds the averaged difference-distribution matrix over five superbox layers, using Gram moments and MDS code constraints. Final-round MixColumns omission is retained.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026

Mímir is a cryptographic protocol for stateless semantic private search over highly dynamic public databases. It uses homomorphic ciphertext switching, relies on (Ring) Learning with Errors, and needs no offline communication. Against Tiptoe it matches search quality with 84x less per-query communication (0.24 MiB). Against PACMANN it raises quality from 76% to 81% of non-private search, with a 9.54 MiB one-time cost instead of 2.68 GiB, but is 2.1x slower.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026

Balsamic is a complete homomorphic Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar (UOV) signer, used to build one-round threshold UOV signatures from a packed discrete-CKKS FHE circuit. A paired-pivot linear solver and pivot-success certificates allow encrypted retry selection. In 2-out-of-3 semihonest signing, each online partial signature takes 10.7 s on an RTX 6000 Ada and 7.77 s on a GB300, with 5.25 MB per response.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026

Paper by Shivansh Jaiswal and Somitra Sanadhya (IACR ePrint 2026/2601) on integer coordinate families for threshold RSA signatures with prime exponent e. It shows the CT-RSA 2026 Ng-Lau scheme admits trivial forgeries and has a flawed proof. It proposes repaired scheme PiIC and integer secret-sharing scheme PiZ for any prime e and any (t,n), both proven TS-UF-CMA secure under the standard RSA assumption. It also gives super-polynomial coordinate lower bounds for pairwise families.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026

Linear cryptanalysis of FRAST, a TFHE-friendly stream cipher, in the average key setting. It fixes the false-positive problem left open in the earlier attack by Bak et al., showing key differences fall into five indistinguishable classes per round. The Contract algorithm recovers the master key for 10 rounds and, on weak keys of density 2^-11.8 to 2^-5.4, reaches full FRAST within the claimed security.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026

Phoronix reports that Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative mistakenly sent several Linux kernel vulnerability reports to the public kernel mailing list instead of the private security list. They include two CVSS 9.0 remote code execution bugs (SMB Direct integer underflow, ksmbd race condition), a skb_zerocopy local privilege escalation, a vmwgfx out-of-bounds write, an NVMET information disclosure and a search-domain TCP stack buffer overflow. Some have patches in -next branches, and none were yet in mainline.

phoronix.comarticleAdded 23 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026

Oracle's October 2026 Critical Patch Update ships 1,295 fixes covering 1,209 unique CVEs, per Tenable's analysis: 95 critical, 439 high and 582 medium. Fusion Middleware got the most patches (206, 134 remotely exploitable without authentication), followed by E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, Communications, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, MySQL and Java SE. Oracle flags no exploitation in the wild and issued a separate alert for CVE-2026-91403 (eMudhra weak-key incident).

securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 22 Oct 2026

Thomas Decru's ePrint 2026/2595 proves a corrected version of radical isogeny formulae for every N≥4, odd and even, over fields of characteristic coprime to 2N. It settles the sign choice for even N so that 2-isogeny walks stay on the volcano surface. One radical step costs about 12.5N multiplications and one exponentiation, and the paper shows how to evaluate radical isogenies on points, so a CSIDH class group action needs no torsion point sampling.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026

Efficient Laconic Oblivious Transfer with Malicious Security is an ePrint paper (2026/2593, ASIACRYPT 2026 revision) giving the first maliciously secure laconic OT that uses its primitives only as black boxes. It adds equivocal vector commitments and maliciously secure witness encryption to the commitment-plus-witness-encryption paradigm. Security is proven in the UC model against malicious senders and in the context model against malicious receivers. Instantiations use LWE and bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumptions in the standard model.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026

The PHP Foundation's October 21, 2026 postmortem says Chainguard broke an embargo by publishing patched PHP container images over six hours before the coordinated release of fixes for CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, two critical RCE flaws. The piece covers the leaked CVE IDs, Calif's accidentally published exploit video, Chainguard CEO Dan Lorenc's defence citing exploitation in the wild, and the 2024 origin of the memory management bug.

socket.devarticlePublished and added 21 Oct 2026

Analysis of the eMudhra intermediate CA compromise disclosed 20 October 2026, in which eight intermediate CA private keys were weak P-384 keys (top 376 bits zero, one key equal to 4) and publicly accessible. It explains web PKI chains and why browsers enforcing Certificate Transparency were not exposed. It argues MCU firmware that bundles only the single root it needs, as in Zephyr's HTTP GET sample, is likely safe unless it trusts an eMudhra or Sectigo cross-signing root.

danielmangum.comarticleAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026

The PHP Foundation explains the 21 October 2026 release of PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35, which fix two critical unauthenticated RCE flaws in memory management and error handling, including an OOM problem behind CVE-2026-109618. It covers the 2024 Quarkslab audit, the stalled fix, the August 2026 reports from Calif, OpenAI and Wiz, and the embargo leaks (CVE IDs, a Calif video, Chainguard images). It also lists new security team structure and AI-assisted triage.

thephp.foundationarticleAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026

Rerandomizable Garbling for Arithmetic Circuits is an IACR ePrint paper (2026/2590) by Acharya, Meyer, Orlandi and Roy. It gives the first rerandomizable garbling scheme for arithmetic circuits, built on techniques from garbling via homomorphic secret sharing. Communication is O(|C| log B), with 17 group elements per multiplication gate and free additions. Security rests on subgroup-indistinguishability assumptions such as DCR and class groups.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026

Eight intermediate CA certificates issued by Indian CA eMudhra in April 2025 had private keys generated with weak entropy, effectively all zeroes except the last byte, so they could be recovered almost instantly with baby-step giant-step. Mozilla and Google blocked them on 17 October 2026, Apple on 19 October and Microsoft on 20 October. eMudhra blamed a key ceremony script flaw that created a second, weaker key pair.

securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 21 Oct 2026

This ePrint paper gives the first exact bit-level models of modular multiplication z=(x·y) mod 2^n. One model is for monomial prediction under 3SDP-woU, the other for impossible differential search. Applied to the MSX lightweight cipher, it yields a 7-round integral distinguisher (2^96 data) for MSX-128, key recoveries on 8 and 9 of 18 rounds at about 2^228 operations, and 1,984 seven-round impossible differentials. Both models are implemented in CLAASP.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026

Rounded Gaussians are Discrete Gaussians is an IACR ePrint paper (2026/2583) by Corentin Jeudy. It shows that setting the rounded Gaussian parameter to sigma = s - 1/(24s) gives a distribution within Rényi divergence 1 + O(1/s^8) of a discrete Gaussian of parameter s. Lattice schemes can then use the simple, constant-time-friendly, low-memory rounded sampler while analyzing security against an ideal discrete Gaussian.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026

SoK on design-level backdoors in block ciphers. It places four published designs (Rijmen and Preneel, Paterson, Bannier and Filiol, Peyrin and Wang) in one taxonomy and gives a sound algorithm that recovers a partition trapdoor from S-box tables. It attacks KG-DES, BEA-1 and LowMC-M: KG-DES key recovery takes minutes, and the LowMC-M MALICIOUS backdoor yields the key from 35 to 409 queries. Trapdoors hidden in linear layers leave no trace, so the authors recommend deriving constants verifiably from a public seed.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026

eMudhra, an Indian certificate authority with over 60 million issued certificates, had eight CA private keys that were tiny integers such as 4, 56 and 237. Researcher Scott Helme recovered all eight from public certificates in under a second, and the keys were exposed from April 2025. Mozilla, Chrome, Apple and Microsoft blocked them between 17 and 20 October 2026, but curl, Python, Node.js, Go and Java accepted a forged Stripe API certificate because they skip revocation checks.

coindesk.comarticlePublished and added 21 Oct 2026

RDK-CKKS is a framework for rigorous probabilistic error analysis of CKKS homomorphic encryption. It injects randomization keys (encryptions of zero) at key-switching and rescaling so each operation's error has provable tail bounds, which noise flooding needs for IND-CPA^D and threshold settings. It gives a full rigorous analysis of binary bootstrapping, at about 3% extra modulus and 27% extra key communication over bootstrapping keys.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026

Broadcast and Trace from Lattices is a 2026 ePrint preprint by Jeffrey Champion. It builds collusion-resistant broadcast and trace with public tracing from attribute-based encryption with succinct ciphertexts and lockable obfuscation, both known from decomposed LWE. Ciphertexts are sqrt(N)·poly(λ, log N) in size, with poly(λ, log N) keys. It is the first such scheme based on a simple, instance-independent lattice assumption.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026

eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise is a 20 October 2026 link-blog post reporting that private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate CA certificates were compromised. They chain to roots trusted by the Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple and Chrome programs. Software bundling trust lists needs updating: Linux distros must update ca-certificates, and uv 0.13.4, pip 26.2.2 and certifi 2026.10.19 ship new lists. The post does not describe how the keys were compromised.

simonwillison.netarticleAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026

Further Elaborations on the Provable Dual Attack is an October 2026 ePrint paper by Kaveh Bashiri presenting a provable dual attack on LWE that recovers a subvector of the secret, with an explicit success-probability bound and no heuristic assumptions. It unifies the analyses of Pouly and Shen (EUROCRYPT 2024) and Bashiri and Wiemers (2025). Applied to ML-KEM it improves the first provable dual attack by 22 to 100 bits; it is also applied to ML-DSA and tested on small instances. The author states ML-KEM and ML-DSA are not threatened.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026

Preprint by Jiseung Kim, Minkyu Kim, Changmin Lee and Hochang Lee on the Regular Syndrome Decoding (RSD) problem. It presents a hybrid-algebraic attack that balances zero-coordinate guesses and syndrome-based eliminations across regular blocks. Parameter sets in Ferret, Wolverine and committed VOLE fall below 128-bit targets by up to 67 bits, and the revised Liu et al. (EUROCRYPT 2024) PCG sets cost under 2^111 field operations.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026

Preprint 2026/2563 presents a refined hybrid-algebraic attack on Regular Syndrome Decoding (RSD) that balances zero-coordinate guesses and syndrome-based eliminations across all regular blocks. It puts at least one parameter set each from Ferret (CCS 2020), Wolverine (IEEE S&P 2021) and committed VOLE (CCS 2025) below the 128-bit target, with losses up to 67 bits. PCG attack costs improve by up to 29.77 bits (non-binary) and 25.91 bits (binary), and the revised Liu et al. (EUROCRYPT 2024) 128-bit sets fall below 2^111 field operations.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026

Graphs and cycles in curve-based collision walks is an IACR ePrint paper (2026/2560) on van Oorschot-Wiener style collision attacks in the multi-user setting. It covers elliptic curve discrete logarithms and isogeny pathfinding on supersingular F_p^2 and F_p curves, and proposes new pseudorandom walks. For F_p^2 curves, L keys need about L + log(L) useful collisions with no infiltrator. For F_p curves, about 0.75L keys fall to L collisions with an infiltrator.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026

Registered ABE via Predicate Encodings, Revisited is an ePrint paper by Junichi Tomida (October 2026) that gives a new definition of predicate encodings suited to registered attribute-based encryption. It yields the first Reg-ABE schemes for (non-)zero inner product and for conjunctions/disjunctions with O(log L)-size ciphertexts. It also gives a registered broadcast encryption scheme with O(log L)-size ciphertexts under the standard k-Lin assumption, not the generic group model.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026

Analysis of DeepDistinguisher, a transformer model that tells Goppa codes from random linear codes. Using saliency maps and attention visualization, the authors find a low-weight-row artifact in the random training instances that the model partly uses. They propose a pairwise-XOR rule on generator matrix rows that correlates strongly with the model's predictions. On random matrices meeting the minimum distance and XOR constraints, the model loses most of its accuracy, so it exploits general combinatorial properties rather than hidden algebraic structure.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026

Castryck, Dina, Kutas and Lorenzon study the Shimura class group action on superspecial principally polarized abelian varieties with a CM orientation, as a post-quantum commutative group action for key exchange. They give tools to represent CM orientations through higher-dimensional isogenies and to compute the action in the restricted effective group action model. These rely on a CM version of Kani's lemma and a trick that often halves the ambient dimension. The paper also gives a method for finding oriented superspecial abelian surfaces and analyses obstructions to transitivity.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026

Concrete LDVR Attacks with Fewer Signers is an ePrint paper by Renas Bacho on the low-dimensional vector representation (LDVR) problem behind adaptive security of threshold Schnorr. It combines a Chinese remainder theorem construction with a generalized birthday search to attack 488 signers with 173 corruptions over the Curve25519 scalar field, down from 5,020 signers. For adversarial evaluation points, it reaches optimal success probability and breaks 228 signers with 114 corruptions in 168.60 seconds.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026

Evasive Inner Product Functional Encryption Is Broken Too is a 2026 ePrint paper by Agrawal, Modi, Yadav and Yamada. It gives a counterexample showing the evasive IPFE assumption of Hsieh, Lin and Luo (Eurocrypt 2024) is false in full generality. The attack extends the 2025 PRFE counterexample and needs only the weak inner product functionality, not pseudorandom function computation. The authors conclude that letting the adversary choose unrestricted private coins breaks the Evasive LWE family.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026

New IND-CPA-D Attacks on BFV and BGV is an ACM CCS 2026 paper by Choe, Kang and Stehlé presenting three attacks on FHE schemes whose parameters rely on heuristic noise bounds. Two attacks recover the secret key and one breaks the IND-CPA-D game. Experiments use HElib for BGV and OpenFHE for BFV, where full key recovery takes minutes to hours.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026

A Note on the Security of ECDSA with Presignatures or Biased Nonces (Couteau and Makriyannis, ePrint 2026/2545) examines alternative ECDSA modes built for faster distributed signing. It shows that the security of some variants used in deployed libraries is equivalent, in the generic group and random oracle model, to the average-case hardness of k-SUM. It also proves fine-grained lower bounds on generic group attacks against modes analyzed by Groth and Shoup (Eurocrypt 2022).

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026

This ePrint paper (2026/2543) gives a key-recovery attack on the GTLN knapsack public-key cryptosystem of Gómez-Torrecillas, Lobillo and Navarro. Continued fractions recover small-denominator ratios of public-key differences, and gcd computations then yield private-key integers, the modulus and the shift, using only the public key. The Python implementation recovered the full private key in all 2,400 trials across 24 recommended parameter sets, each in under 0.05 seconds.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026

Provable Lattice Reduction in Nearly the Time of QR Factorization (IACR ePrint 2026/2541, October 2026) presents a deterministic lattice-reduction algorithm with running time Õ(n^ω(1+log κ_col(B))), free of heuristic assumptions. Its implementation used fewer instructions than flatter (CRYPTO 2023) in all 153 runs on q-ary, NTRU-like, scaled q-ary and Coppersmith inputs. Median flatter-to-new instruction ratios are 1.55 for q-ary and 1.86 for NTRU-like inputs.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026

This paper presents an end-to-end GPU implementation of the HQC code-based key encapsulation mechanism. It speeds up GF(2) polynomial multiplication with a parallel Frobenius additive FFT and a Toeplitz matrix-vector mapping onto INT1 tensor cores. On an RTX 4090 the multiplier reaches 3,828k polymul/s, about 2.9x the earlier HIGH implementation. Full KEM throughput is 1.56x, 1.55x and 2.03x higher for keygen, encaps and decaps. Five thread-to-KEM mapping variants are tested on RTX 3090 and Jetson AGX Orin.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026

Off-Key is a privacy attack on SPDZ-family maliciously secure MPC protocols that exploits inconsistent MAC keys. Depending on the MAC check protocol, a corrupted party recovers a shared secret from one authentication check or tests guesses through selective failure. The authors show it in MP-SPDZ, SCALE-MAMBA and FANNG-MPC, where a corrupted party can use different keys across batches, threads or runs, and describe the preprocessing state that enforces key consistency.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 19 Oct 2026

Computing endomorphisms of superspecial principally polarized abelian surfaces is a cryptanalysis preprint by Marc Houben and Lam L. Pham, posted to IACR ePrint in October 2026. It gives an algorithm that, under a standard heuristic, finds a non-scalar polarized endomorphism in expected time and memory p^(4/5+o(1)). The abstract is the only text available, so the method and its effect on specific schemes are not described.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 19 Oct 2026, published 18 Oct 2026

Revisiting the Security of VDOO is an ePrint paper (October 2026) on VDOO, a multivariate signature scheme submitted to China's NGCC program. It models VDOO as a multilayer Rainbow construction, keeps only the last oil space to get a generalized UOV instance, and applies wedge attacks. For the 512-bit parameter set it estimates 2^432 gates (reconciliation) and 2^379 gates (intersection), below the claimed level and the specification's figures.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 19 Oct 2026, published 18 Oct 2026

ePrint 2026/2527 by Paola de Perthuis and Filip Trenkić analyses module-BKZ attacks on NTRU+, the South Korean KEM standard. It introduces relative canonical and coefficient embeddings and shows they agree up to scaling exactly when rad(c)/rad(ℓ) is 1 or 2. Simulation-based estimates show the best module attack saves 4 to 10 blocksizes, costing NTRU+ keys at most three bits of Core-SVP security. NTRU+ parameters stay safe in the overstretched regime.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 19 Oct 2026, published 18 Oct 2026

SecurityWeek summarises CyberSN's Cybersecurity Jobs Report. US cybersecurity postings fell 26.4% to 235,786 for January–September 2026, a four-year low. AI Security Engineer demand rose 268.3% and Cyber Data Scientist demand rose 203.5%. Penetration Tester (-45.9%), Threat Hunter (-40.0%) and CISO (-38.9%) postings dropped, and the CISO figure matches 2024 after an unusually strong 2025. Just under 15% of postings mention AI, peaking at 20.0% in September. The report counts postings by work required (CyberSN's 45-role taxonomy) rather than by job title, and it describes what changed, not why.

securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 18 Oct 2026

"GKS FHE: Security Analysis" is a Cryptology ePrint Archive preprint (2026/2523, October 2026) giving a formal security analysis of the Gribov-Kahrobaei-Shpilrain private-key fully homomorphic encryption scheme. The abstract says the scheme needs no bootstrapping or de-linearization, gives bit-exact decryption, supports native encrypted search and has unbounded depth. The page shows only the abstract, so the analysis's methods and results are not visible.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 19 Oct 2026, published 18 Oct 2026

Forum announcement of a Zenodo preprint on post-quantum migration for censorship-resistant P2P steganographic tunnels. It argues that ML-KEM's prime modulus (q=3329) makes naive bit-packed ciphertexts statistically distinguishable from uniform noise, which gives a cheap passive DPI distinguisher. It also argues that composite PQ 0-RTT envelopes over 4.4 KB force fragmentation, which requires stateful reassembly before AEAD verification and reopens memory-exhaustion DoS in eBPF/XDP filters. Proposed fixes are algebraic uniformization (LWR lattices or inverse rejection sampling), sub-MTU hybrid or pure-PQ envelopes (Falcon-512, signcryption), and Fujisaki–Okamoto implicit rejection for constant-time silent drops. Aimed at Ethereum validator, libp2p and RPC transports facing harvest-now-decrypt-later threats.

ethereum-magicians.orgpaperPublished and added 17 Oct 2026

Determines, to first order in 1/p with an explicit error bound, the proportion of superspecial principally polarized abelian surfaces over F_p-bar (p ≡ 3 mod 4) that are optimally (N,N)-split. The expected number of optimal splittings is exactly 5N·J_2(N)(p-1)/(p²+1), so the split proportion is about 5N·J_2(N)/p. This gives the stationary target density of the splitting-detection attack on the dimension-two superspecial isogeny problem, which was previously known only from experiments or a one-sided bound. The proofs use Siegel's mass formula and genus averages over refined Humbert invariants, and every formula was checked by exact computation at twelve primes.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 17 Oct 2026

Presents a fixed-point C implementation of the Mitaka signing algorithm, a simpler, parallelizable Falcon (FN-DSA) variant. It replaces MitakaZ's wide integral Gram root decomposition with a fixed-point square Cholesky decomposition, which cuts the cost of integer Gaussian sampling, and proves bounds on intermediate values and representation errors without empirical assumptions. Signing averages 361 kcycles (Mitaka-512) and 707 kcycles (Mitaka-1024) on AVX2, and 4.0 and 7.8 Mcycles on an STM32F411 Cortex-M4F. This makes floating-point-free lattice signatures practical on constrained devices.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 17 Oct 2026

CoinDesk reports that an Anthropic internal research model traced five NSA-supplied NIST elliptic-curve seeds to the C library generator lrand48 fed with 1997–98 timestamps. It matched P-256's published seed at the 1,842nd candidate, in under 30 minutes and without being told about the earlier "forgotten phrase" theory. This makes a hidden backdoor in the NIST curves less likely, though why some candidates were skipped and how other curve parameters were chosen remain unexplained. The article also explains why Bitcoin's secp256k1 was never part of the question, and that quantum risk is a separate threat.

coindesk.comarticlePublished and added 17 Oct 2026

Cryptanalysis of the Eevee forkcipher-based AEAD modes Umbreon and Espeon, which claim online AE security under nonce reuse. Associated-data correlations give probability-one non-empty-message forgeries with three encryption queries and one verification query. The paper adds an affine treatment of partial final blocks (n-r+3 queries, or n-r+2 with adaptive choices). It also checks the published Umbreon attack with the official ForkSkinny primitive and reports a two-query attack accepted by the unmodified public C modes.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 17 Oct 2026

Anthropic's Frontier Red Team reports that Claude recovered how the NIST P-192/224/256/384/521 and ANSI X9.62 curve seeds were generated. They are outputs of the C library's lrand48 LCG seeded with 1997–98 Unix timestamps, not hashes of a passphrase. The method scanned for weak-PRNG signatures, then used LLL lattice reduction to recover the truncated LCG state and stepped it back to srand48 initialization. Claude also traced some base points to the FreeLIP/NTL random generator. Reproducible Python is included. The authors say this is not an attack and makes deliberate backdoors less plausible. The B-163 seed and the base points of P-224/256/384/521 and the binary curves remain unexplained.

anthropic.comwriteupAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026

a16z crypto announces Aerie, a lattice-SNARK system that aggregates Falcon-512/1024 signatures into one ~66 KiB proof. On an M4 Max laptop it handles 32,768 signatures in 0.65 s (~50k/s), verifies in 54 ms, and costs ~42 bytes per signature. It benchmarks against Orthus and Ethereum's leanVM hash-based XMSS aggregation, and argues that recursion-free lattice aggregation is simpler than hash-only designs. It also covers Falcon's hardware-wallet and side-channel constraints and why private payments need lattice encryption such as ML-KEM.

a16zcrypto.comarticlePublished and added 16 Oct 2026

Aerie is an a16z crypto and LayerZero Labs system that aggregates Falcon-512 and Falcon-1024 lattice signatures into one lattice SNARK. On an Apple M4 Max it aggregates 32,768 Falcon-512 signatures in 0.65 seconds, with 54 ms verification and about 42 bytes per signature. The post compares it with Ethereum's hash-based leanVM and XMSS plan and Orthus, and covers Falcon signing limits on hardware wallets.

a16zfrontier.comarticleAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026

CHAMP is a Cayley hash function that hashes binary strings by mapping each bit to a 2x2 matrix over a finite field and multiplying the matrices. The product's semigroup structure gives the hash homomorphic properties. The authors (Demin, Ovchinnikov, Shpilrain) discuss its collision resistance, implementation and performance. Cayley-style hashes have a history of structural attacks, so the security analysis is what a cryptographer would check.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026

The paper revisits the multi-key optimization for SPECK, a code-based signature scheme that uses the Permutation Code Equivalence Problem (PEP) as a trapdoor for the Permuted Kernel Problem (PKP). Each SPECK round has soundness error 1/2, which inflates signatures, and the SPECK authors had warned that naively using multiple public keys creates security concerns. The authors analyse those concerns, give conditions and parameter constraints under which multiple keys can be integrated securely, and show that conservative parameters perform poorly but leave room for improvement. They also build a ring signature scheme on the same construction.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026

Introduces SLEEK, a QC-MDPC code-based KEM using a three-iteration parallel bit-flipping decoder and a closed-form decoding-failure-rate (DFR) estimate, enabling parameters with analytically bounded failure probability and standard IND-CCA transforms. SLEEK-LT targets IND-CCA for long-term keys; SLEEK-E targets IND-CPA for ephemeral keys using a new QC key structure with security equivalent to QC-MDPC and cheaper key generation. Parameter sets cover 80/128/192/256-bit security, and the optimized AVX2 implementation gives ciphertexts 4.9x smaller than HQC (47% slower) and 1.3x–2.7x faster than BIKE.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026

ePrint paper presenting the first optimized implementation of the BF-max bit-flipping decoder for the code-based KEM BIKE, combined with other decoders to trade off decoding failure rate, runtime, public-key and ciphertext size in ephemeral-key settings. It cuts public-key and ciphertext sizes by 7.8% versus LeanBIKE at similar speed and DFR, and gives a combined size 22% below BIKE and 2.79x below HQC. It shows BIKE can fit constrained protocols such as IKEv2, which matters for practical post-quantum migration.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026

ePrint paper presenting safeRNSgcd, which computes the single Bézout coefficient needed at the deepest level of Falcon's NTRU solver while keeping large integers in a residue number system. Centered explicit CRT recovers the exact low bits needed by SafeGCD batches using single-word fixed-point arithmetic. A C implementation integrated into ntrugen reduces inversion and private-key basis-generation cost on a Raspberry Pi 5 and two x86-64 CPUs, versus the original ntrugen and a variant that skips the unused coefficient.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026

Proposes "guarded sharing", a technique that moves few-time signatures in SPHINCS-style stateless hash-based schemes from a tree model to a DAG model. Combined with bucket thinning, hash chains and rejection sampling, it yields BGS-CC, which improves on the prior best few-time scheme BPORS-C+BFP. For 128-bit security and a use quota of Q=2^24 it gives 2,228-byte signatures, the first SPHINCS-based stateless signature shorter than ML-DSA-44's 2,420 bytes. This matters for PQ migration because signature size is the main drawback of SLH-DSA.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026

Talos Threat Source newsletter arguing that record CVE volume (over 70k by end of Q3, six-digit CVE IDs) is not the same as exploitation. KEV grew only 37% YoY against 105% for CVEs, about a third of KEV entries are CVEs from 2025 or earlier (a patch gap), and 29% of 2026 KEV CVEs were added on their publication date. It also notes the new KEV "forensicTriage" column (BOD 26-04), summarizes the Talos/Insikt report on UAT-6275 espionage against CIS governments with GitHub-hosted payloads and a WinRAR exploit, and lists weekly headlines.

blog.talosintelligence.comarticlePublished and added 15 Oct 2026

GhostFaceMPC is presented as the first end-to-end face recognition system that runs a deep CNN feature extractor (GhostFaceNet) and the matching step under secure multi-party computation. Raw images and biometric embeddings are never exposed during extraction, storage or matching. The authors contribute an MPC-friendly quantization of GhostFaceNet and circuit optimizations that make the approach practical, and they release code at crypto-unict/GhostFaceMPC.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026

ePrint paper cryptanalysing Eevee (Umbreon, Jolteon, Espeon), forkcipher-based AEAD modes proposed at CCS 2023 for IoT-to-cloud computation. It gives a two-encryption AD-free prefix distinguisher, a four-encryption nonce-misuse distinguisher, a deterministic AD-only forgery, and nonce-respecting forgeries on Jolteon and Espeon (fresh one-block forgery reusing the tag; arbitrary AD substitution). It traces these to proof flaws (online-prefix consistency, domain separation, checksum freshness), derives design requirements, and concludes the failures are in the mode design, not the C implementation.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026

Presents a robust threshold ECDSA signing protocol for t ≤ (n-1)/3 corrupted signers. It batch-computes pre-processing material for fast online signing and scales to many signers, for uses such as bridging consensus between blockchains. It combines batched verifiable secret sharing (Fitzi & Hirt), randomness extraction (Beerliova-Trubiniova & Hirt), efficient share opening (Damgård & Nielsen) and Attema–Cramer zero-knowledge proofs. The authors implement it and show it is practical for large n.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026

T-EVOLVE extends the lattice-commitment e-voting protocol EVOLVE to threshold tallying. Votes are Shamir-shared, so any t of n authorities can finish the tally. Privacy holds against t-1 colluding authorities and verifiability holds even if all of them collude. The voter proves her committed shares form a Reed-Solomon codeword whose value at zero is a valid vote. Complaints about ciphertexts that do not decrypt are publicly verifiable, using an LWE-instantiable encryption scheme with publicly verifiable opening. Privacy, verifiability, individual verifiability and robustness are proven in the classical random oracle model, and the verifiability reduction is not tight. In a C implementation, a yes/no ballot for four authorities takes 109 KB, and an authority aggregates 10^4 ballots in about three minutes on one core.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026

Shows a protocol-level reaction attack on CKKS homomorphic-encryption deployments that publish coefficient-to-slot (C2S) evaluation keys and let the client return a 1-bit validity response. A malicious evaluator shifts a public encryption key, uses the public C2S layer to repack it into a ciphertext whose validity depends on one secret coefficient, and recovers a ternary secret key with O(H) queries, within a factor 2/log2(3) of the entropy lower bound. Each query is re-randomized with a fresh encryption of zero to evade trivial detection. The authors implemented it end to end in Lattigo v6.2.0 and recovered full keys across four standard CKKS parameter sets. It does not break RLWE or CKKS IND-CPA security.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026

ePrint paper presenting an NVIDIA GPU implementation of FAEST (a post-quantum signature scheme built on VOLE-in-the-Head and QuickSilver), covering key generation and OWFProve/OWFVerify for standard and EM constructions in s and f variants. Profiling shows field multiplication takes about 82% of FAEST-128f signing time once AES is hardware-accelerated. Using PTX clmad carry-less multiplication plus Karatsuba, it reaches up to 26.6x kernel throughput and about 2.9-3.1x full 256-bit OWFProve throughput over the software-multiplication build on an RTX A5000.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026

Bankless article on Eigen Labs' Yukon platform, which runs open challenges where researchers and AI agents attack and improve cryptography. It covers ECDSA.fail (quantum circuit cost for attacking Bitcoin/Ethereum ECDSA, cut about 88% from baseline), HashSmash (SHA-256 weakness hunting, so far only on reduced versions), sig.golf (hash-based signatures), StarkWare's Quantum Safe Bitcoin (cost down from about $320 to $59) and better.codes (provable security raised from 64 to about 68 bits). The argument is that public, measurable attack-cost data helps defenders prepare better than withholding circuits does. All gains are theoretical and no quantum computer has run an attack at this scale.

bankless.comarticlePublished and added 14 Oct 2026

Roundup of ICS Patch Tuesday advisories. Siemens published 17 advisories, including critical flaws in Simatic S7-1500 CPUs (400+ flaws in the GNU/Linux subsystem), Industrial Edge and Ruggedcom Crossbow SAC. Rockwell fixed a critical 1732E ArmorBlock flaw that lets an unauthenticated attacker change the web server password and take over the admin account, plus a DoS bug. Also covered: two high-severity Schneider Electric advisories (Pro-Face STW6000/Harmony STW6 and Sage RTUs), CISA and CERT@VDE advisories, and other vendor advisories since the last Patch Tuesday. ABB's dynovaPRO credential-reset bypass came with 26 password change events across 9 customers that may indicate reconnaissance.

securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 14 Oct 2026

The paper proposes a post-quantum architecture for WireGuard that leaves the core protocol unchanged. A mutually authenticated TLS 1.3 control channel runs over TCP, UDP (DTLS) or QUIC and uses ML-KEM key establishment, with X.509 certificates from a PKI signed with ML-DSA. A shared secret derived from the session's exported keying material is injected into WireGuard's native PSK interface. A Tamarin model of the TLS–WireGuard composition layer checks secrecy, binding and provisioning-order properties and identifies the conditions needed for secure deployment. The authors benchmark handshake latency and CPU time for classical, pure-PQ and hybrid key establishment across the three transports, and compare against the Rosenpass PQ WireGuard baseline.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026

Paper that links linear, integral, differential-linear and restricted differential distinguishers through two-way conversions with explicit divisibility guarantees and data complexity. It gives automated MILP/SAT models (Walsh and ultrametric representations, exact mix-basis models) and a black-box FWHT histogram search for zeros and finite divisibility. It improves Beyne–Verbauwhede divisibility bounds in 674 SIMON cases (e.g. 2^5 to 2^11 on 9-round SIMON32) and PRESENT. It also gives first higher-divisibility proofs for 8-round SPECK and BEANIE, new bounds for GIFT-64 and Ascon, and new properties on RC5, ChiLow-32, KeeLoq and KATAN32.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026

Furue and Aikawa build and analyze algebraic attacks on the Regular Syndrome Decoding Problem (RSDP), which underlies code-based post-quantum schemes. They extend the Wang et al. hybrid algorithm to allow an arbitrary XL solving degree d, and add two variants: an XFL-based one (partial Gaussian elimination plus variable guessing) and a WXL-based one that exploits Macaulay matrix sparsity. Complexity analysis shows the WXL variant with d>2 wins for small block size β, while the original hybrid wins as β grows. This matters for setting RSDP-based scheme parameters.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026

Preprint that speeds up Pollard rho on GPUs by rebuilding field arithmetic: packed normal-basis representation, the CUDA 13.3 PTX carry-less multiply (clmad), and three-input logic instructions. On one RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell it goes from 0.85 to 14.64 billion iterations/s (17.2x) on the Certicom ECC2K-130 challenge, which puts the whole challenge under five GPU-years. The same levers give 1.52x on P-256 and 2.61x on P-384, which leaves P-256 about 6e21 card-years away. It also reports twelve GPUs from Turing to Blackwell, an FPGA engine on AWS F2 and a campaign that covered 5.4% of the expected work, with code and a Dockerfile on GitHub (rho-blackwell). It claims no improvement on the generic-group bound.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026

CoinDesk summarizes Coinbase's recommendations for making Bitcoin quantum-resistant before a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) can derive private keys from public keys. The proposals are: a transaction format that can carry new signature types (P2MR/BIP-360, P2TRv2), staged hybrid "1-of-2" spends with ECDSA/Schnorr or a post-quantum key, and stateless options alongside stateful schemes to avoid key-reuse forgery. They also ask that evaluation favor constant-time, RNG-failure-safe implementations, require MPC compatibility, and handle dormant or late-migrating coins as a separate debate. It is a useful overview of the defensive migration design space, but it is secondary reporting and not the primary Coinbase paper.

coindesk.comarticlePublished and added 14 Oct 2026

ePrint entry for an ACM CCS 2026 paper in the "Attacks and cryptanalysis" category. By its title and keywords, it shows that snapshots of encrypted databases built on trusted execution environments leak plaintext frequency histograms, using a technique called "dendrochronology". The abstract and full text are embargoed until the end of October 2026, so the attack mechanics are not available yet. It matters to anyone assessing the real leakage of TEE-backed encrypted databases against snapshot adversaries.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026

SecurityWeek reports that an OpenAI engineer, Abdulrahman Alfozan, was arrested by the FBI and charged with illegally intercepting oral communications. A recording device, concealed in toilet paper, had been plugged into a USB port on the back of a conference-room TV. OpenAI says it used its own models to analyse the device and identify the employee, and that it has no indication model weights, source code or customer data were accessed. The complaint cites CCTV footage, a camera later added to the room, and the employee's productivity-tool queries about meeting rooms and calendars.

securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 13 Oct 2026

Rapid7's analysis of Microsoft's October 2026 Patch Tuesday, which covers 1,413 vulnerabilities, 1,102 of them in Windows. It highlights the exploited Windows Shell Mark of the Web bypass (CVE-2026-96951) and the publicly disclosed .NET Framework WDAC bypass (CVE-2026-108398). It also covers five no-interaction Outlook preview-pane RCEs, the Edge advisories that list no CVEs, and end-of-support dates for Server 2012/2012 R2, Office 2021, Exchange 2016/2019 and Windows 11 24H2. The page text is truncated, so the later CVE tables are not seen.

rapid7.comadvisoryPublished and added 13 Oct 2026

Reports the federal arrest of OpenAI engineer Abdulrahman Alfozan, charged with using a device to intercept oral communications after an encrypted audio recorder was found in a San Francisco executive conference room. The recorder was hidden in toilet paper and plugged into a TV's USB port. Prosecutors say he used an internal productivity tool to scout rooms and calendars, and a chatbot account tied to his spouse asked how to build, encrypt and remotely access a recorder. OpenAI's technical surveillance countermeasures team found the device, and OpenAI says it used its own models for forensic analysis. It then restricted his access in stages, timed with the FBI, before firing him. A useful insider-threat case study that also covers physical security.

sfstandard.comarticlePublished and added 13 Oct 2026

Google is raising Chrome Vulnerability Reward Program payouts for memory safety bugs. The base rate goes from $500 to $2,000, with up to $20,000 for browser, GPU and network process bugs and up to $8,000 for renderer use-after-free and memory write bugs. V8 sandbox bugs move to a flat $5,000 and V8 logic bugs to $4,000. A $2,000 fuzzer bonus returns, and submissions made after April 30, 2026 are rewarded under the new rules. The rates are still well below the pre-April 2026 levels. The article also notes that Google temporarily closed the OSS VRP to product vulnerability submissions because of a flood of AI-generated reports.

securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 13 Oct 2026

Short paper analysing the HM-QCT hybrid quantum–computational time-lock QKD protocol (Mazzoncini et al., 2025). It spells out the two "harvest now, decrypt later" strategies (quantum memory and classical memory) and shows each is excluded by exactly one of the two assumptions: short-term encryption and low-fidelity quantum storage. It then proposes HM-PRF, which replaces the short-term encryption with a locally evaluated pseudorandom function, so security needs only one-way functions rather than a predicted lasting gap in quantum memory technology.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026

Introduces leakage-resilient incompressible cryptography, a security model combining leakage resilience (partial key leakage plus full ciphertext) with incompressibility (full key but only part of the ciphertext or signature). It gives a transformation from incompressible symmetric-key encryption (SKE) to leakage-resilient incompressible SKE, a leakage-resilient incompressible PKE built from a new leakage-resilient non-committing KEM, and an incompressible SKE with ciphertext and compression rate 1/2 using invertible extractors. It also gives a leakage-resilient incompressible signature scheme in the random oracle model under DCR or LWE plus Decisional Linear. Black-box impossibility results show barriers to improving these parameters.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026

Introduces a cube-attack framework with an elimination strategy. It finds key conditions and cubes whose conditional superpolies are cheap to compute, then solves the resulting equation systems to recover key bits. The supporting techniques are a nested coefficient solver, conditional monomial prediction, an automated cube search combining numeric mapping with monomial prediction, and two testing methods for large equation systems. Against round-reduced Trivium it gives a practical key recovery at 840 rounds (complexity below 2^55, 77.8% success) and at 845 rounds (below 2^56, 98.1% success on 59.1% of keys). It also gives a theoretical weak-key attack at 855 rounds for 2^74 keys. These are the best known results, extending prior practical attacks by 13 rounds and theoretical attacks by 4.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026

Cryptography paper that extends Chen and Fischlin's two-user Signal analysis (Eurocrypt 2024) to group chats. It introduces "causal awareness": a receiver can reconstruct part of the causal context in which an accepted message was sent. Network delay or adversarial interference can otherwise show an authentic message in a misleading context. Senders transmit records of what they have sent and received, and receivers verify these records and compare them with their own. The paper gives correctness and security definitions parameterized by how much causal information must be recovered, baseline constructions with proofs, and checkpoint-aided and server-aided variants. It also discusses how to surface this information in a messenger's UI.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026

The paper builds explicit ReLU neural-network realizations of Camellia-128/192/256 from exact Boolean gates, S-box selectors and bit permutations, and reports known-answer-test agreement for Camellia-128. It shows that whitening and round-key quantities leaked from internal activations determine the master key through public key-schedule identities. Under a synthetic internal-oracle model, symmetric real-valued perturbations recover subkey bits with 128 queries (Camellia-128) or 256 (Camellia-256). Camellia-192 is handled by deterministic key-schedule inversion from direct access to round keys. All 3,000 trials (1,000 keys per variant) recovered the key exactly. The authors state this is not a plaintext/ciphertext-only attack on standard Camellia.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026

Marcel Keller's ePrint compares the two fully secure MPC sorting approaches, Quicksort (Araki et al., CCS'21) and radix sort (Asharov et al., CCS'22). The comparison covers a range of parameters, for both honest- and dishonest-majority settings. The paper then extends the sparse matrix multiplication of Damie et al. (CODASPY'26), which avoids oblivious RAM, so the output comes out in the same format as the inputs. That makes repeated multiplication of graph adjacency matrices possible, which the paper uses to find cycles and scatter-gather patterns associated with money laundering. The result is privacy-preserving anti-money-laundering detection.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026

ePrint paper showing that FIPS 204 Table 1's expected iteration counts for the ML-DSA signing loop cover only the line-23 validity checks (z and r0 norms). They omit the two line-28 encoding-correctness checks (‖c·t0‖∞ and hint weight). It accounts for all four conditions: z by exact counting, c·t0 by an Irwin-Hall tail, and hint weight by a closed-form conditioned per-coefficient probability with a Monte Carlo tail estimate. Corrected expected iterations are 4.36, 5.14 and 3.91 for ML-DSA-44, -65 and -87, within 0.14% of an end-to-end measurement and consistent with NIST's FIPS 204 errata.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 12 Oct 2026

WIRED reports that federal agents obtained warrants in Minnesota and Pennsylvania to use cell-site simulators (Stingrays/IMSI catchers) to locate Jerome Richardson, a producer for Don Lemon charged over the Cities Church protest. Agents also applied for simulator warrants and pen register orders targeting journalist Georgia Fort and others. The piece notes that simulators collect data from bystanders' devices, that affidavits contained a false claim about chanting, and that WIRED used EFF's detection software to find signs of a simulator near the 2024 DNC in Chicago.

wired.comarticlePublished and added 12 Oct 2026

The paper analyses stateful hash-based signatures whose key is a tree of hash chains, and asks what a second signature from the same one-time key reveals after state loss or rollback. It proves that the values derivable from several signatures are exactly the union of those from each signature alone. It also bounds forgery after b signatures in the classical random-oracle model by a combinatorial coverage exponent λ_b, including when the signer grinds a counter. It then introduces CUTS, a scheme on one binary tree whose chain positions sum to a fixed value S and whose signature size and verification cost do not depend on tree height. One parameter set has 1,424-byte signatures and λ_2 ≥ 128.6. A counter variant, CUTS+C, gives a proven grinding gain.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 12 Oct 2026

The paper introduces verifiable reconstructible straightline codes (VRSCs) as an abstraction for compiling zkSNARKs into Universally Composable (UC) secure protocols. It shows that the witness-succinct UC compiler of Ganesh et al. (EUROCRYPT 2023) is missing a security requirement: permuting previously revealed evaluation openings yields a fresh accepting proof, which invalidates the claimed simulation argument. The fix uses verifier-enforced disjoint evaluation domains and a pairing-based Fischlin-style instantiation with structured Reed-Solomon codes and jointly computed KZG openings. This brings certificate generation to O(n log n) with constant extra proof size and verification work.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 12 Oct 2026

The paper proves that some properties of UOV (Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar) public-key ideals and varieties hold generically. These include equidimensionality of the UOV varieties and radicality of the public key ideals. This justifies the regularity assumptions used in algebraic cryptanalysis of UOV and its variants. The authors also review earlier multivariate schemes that were broken because they were non-generic, and give one counter-example whose non-genericity looks hard to exploit.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 12 Oct 2026

Let's Encrypt will issue 64-day certificates by default from February 10, 2027, as a step toward 45-day lifetimes planned for 2028, in line with CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements. The last 90-day certificate is expected to expire May 11, 2027, and 64-day certificates are available in staging for testing. Automated clients that support ACME Renewal Info (ARI) need no change. Hardcoded renewal schedules should renew at about two-thirds of the lifetime. Authorization reuse drops to 10 days next year and 7 hours in 2028, which removes the need for CAA rechecking.

securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 12 Oct 2026

Mori and Emura give a generic transformation, a variant of the CHK transformation, that upgrades a public-key authenticated encryption with keyword search (PAEKS) scheme to one secure against chosen-ciphertext and trapdoor attacks (CCTA). It works because the PAEKS receiver names the sender when generating a trapdoor, so keywords can serve as tags. Applied to Li-Boyen generic PAEKS instantiations, it yields the first fully CCTA-secure PAEKS schemes from pairings and from lattices. Verification keys embedded in ciphertexts and trapdoors also let sender-receiver matching use hash tables, so search cost no longer depends on the number of senders.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 11 Oct 2026

ePrint paper by Peigen Li and Siyong Tao extending the wedge-attack framework of Ding, Li and Tao and the Schur-Macaulay matrix approach of Merz and Ran against Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar (UOV). It reformulates the attack with p-truncated polynomial algebras, so it applies over arbitrary finite fields. Divided powers and transfer relations give extra public relations in the ideal-inclusion framework, with quotient-dimension criteria for recovering graded components of the hidden oil-space ideal. Applied to the third-round QR-UOV parameter sets, it gives lower attack-complexity estimates for some of them.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 11 Oct 2026

The paper proposes a generic encrypt-then-MAC transformation for building CCA-secure KEMs. The PKE ciphertext is authenticated by a MAC keyed from the PKE plaintext, so decapsulation no longer needs the Fujisaki-Okamoto re-encryption step. It proves IND-CCA security in the random oracle model from OW-PCA, and IND-qCCA security from a new OW-qPCA notion. It presents ML-KEM-EtM and McElieceEtM (Classic McEliece), and benchmarks ML-KEM-EtM with Poly1305, GMAC, CMAC and KMAC256. The result is a substantially lower decapsulation cycle count for a small cost in encapsulation cycles and ciphertext size.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 11 Oct 2026

Position paper arguing that as AI makes machine-checked proofs cheap, the scarce resource is a human who can read what was proved. It cites a Lean library's Schnorr signature security theorem that passed the checker but held for every adversary and so promised nothing. It shows that on a one-page Verifpal model, two of five verdicts flip under other standard definitions of properties such as forward secrecy. It proposes short, owner-written high-level cryptographic languages, with every claim backed by a checked theorem and a small, versioned, publicly agreed set of built-in security definitions.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 10 Oct 2026

ePrint paper presenting a vectorized implementation of the MQOM v2.1 post-quantum signature scheme (a NIST additional-signature candidate). It uses a transpose-enabled paired-matrix trick to cut wasted SIMD work and memory traffic. It benchmarks key generation, signing, verification and memory on Arm NEON, x86 AVX2 and AVX-512, with peak dynamic memory down by up to 39.43%. Supplementary experiments check how the matrix-layout optimization carries over to the Round-3 MQOM v3 code. Useful for practitioners assessing the deployment cost of post-quantum signatures.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 10 Oct 2026

Cryptanalysis of the Alternating Sponge (ASP) and Duet, a permutation-based hash candidate in China's ICCS Next Generation Commercial Cryptographic Algorithm program (NGCC). The authors give an O(2^r)-query distinguisher against ASP that contradicts its claimed indifferentiability bound in some parameter regimes. They also give a distinguisher and state-recovery attack on Duet's multi-block output, using O(2^(r+c-h)) permutation queries. Collision and preimage resistance are unaffected, but Duet used as a XOF or KDF is affected, and state recovery enables length extension.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026

Proves that the nonce-based MACs Encrypted Wegman-Carter (EWC) and EWCDMD (the dual of EWCDM) are unforgeable beyond the birthday bound. With an n-bit block cipher and an O(2^-n)-AXU hash, both are secure up to 2^{5n/6} MAC queries and nearly 2^n verification queries in the nonce-respecting setting. This settles an open question left by earlier birthday distinguishing attacks (Cogliati–Seurin on EWC, Nandi on EWCDMD), which never yielded forgeries. The proofs analyze forgery events directly through auxiliary experiments. The EWC proof adds conditional permutation analysis and collision multiplicity bounds with KL divergence, and the EWCDMD proof uses Hellinger distance and Fourier analysis.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026

The paper presents RM-KLPT, an algorithm that solves the algebraic pathfinding problem in isogeny graphs of superspecial abelian surfaces with maximal real multiplication. It does this by solving a norm equation in ideals of a quaternion algebra over a real quadratic field. The authors implement it and revisit the RM-CGL hash function of Charles, Goren and Lauter. They show that if the initial surface's algebraic description is known, RM-KLPT gives a second-preimage attack on the hash. Paths are much shorter (~p^3) than with KLPT^2, because a higher-dimensional Deuring correspondence exists in the RM setting. The paper also discusses cryptographic constructions that could be built on RM-KLPT.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026

ePrint preprint extending the Ducas–Engelberts–Loyer provable subexponential Gaussian sampler (built on Wagner's generalized birthday algorithm) to module matrices over power-of-two cyclotomic rings. It gives provable 2^{O(n/lnln n)}-time algorithms for Module-SIS and for decision and search Module-LWE using only the k+ℓ ring samples provided, plus sample-preserving scalar search-LWE and narrow Module-LWE variants. Separate heuristic estimates suggest these Wagner-style attacks do not reach the NIST security targets of ML-KEM and ML-DSA.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026

ePrint paper by Andrew Krapivin and Elaine Shi that breaks the long-standing log-squared upper-bound barrier for statistically secure Oblivious RAM and for oblivious search trees in the external-memory model. It gives an optimal O(log_B N) statistically secure ORAM when B ≥ log^{1+ε} N. It also gives an optimal oblivious search tree when B ≥ log^{2+ε} N, which matches non-oblivious search trees ("obliviousness for free"). The block-size assumptions match hardware-enclave deployments that use oblivious algorithms, such as those of Signal and Meta.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 11 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026

The paper proves, under GRH, a worst-case to average-case reduction inside any special genus of Hermitian lattices of fixed rank r≥2 over cyclotomic fields. It covers (H)SVP, HCVP, (Δ)BDD, DSP and DGS, at a poly(d)·det^{O_r(1)/d} loss in the approximation factor. The reduction is a random walk on the Kneser p-neighbour graph, and its fast mixing comes from spectral bounds on Hecke operators. It also gives a direct, tight security proof for a minimal Lattice Isomorphism Problem (LIP) based KEM. The proof rests on two assumptions: the KEM's lattice is indistinguishable from a random lattice of its genus, and ΔBDD is hard on that genus. This removes the need for the ad-hoc qΛ⊕(q+1)Λ lattice and the tightness loss from the dense sublattice.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 11 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026

This IACR eprint paper by Cong, Smart, Tanguy and Walter (Zama) shows how to eliminate Zero-Knowledge Proofs-of-Knowledge from the FHE-based malicious-secure MPC protocol of Smart (IMA, 2023), simplifying and modularizing its security proof. It introduces a formal security notion for "encrypted PRF" functionality within FHE schemes and proves the Deo et al. (CCS 2025) construction secure under this model, yielding a more practical and efficient MPC-from-FHE protocol.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026

This IACR ePrint paper by Yi-Fu Lai and Yu Yu breaks the blindness property of a lattice-based blind signature scheme presented at Crypto 2020, which uses a linear hash function framework instantiated over lattices. The authors first identify an overlooked bug in the scheme's original blindness security proof, then construct a concrete attack under an honest-key, honest-but-curious signer model by exploiting correlations between leaves of the scheme's tree structure, and discuss how the construction can be repaired.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026

This paper introduces Alhena (synchronous) and Wasat (asynchronous), two helper-aided multi-party computation protocols that achieve "identifiable fairness": if an adversary aborts the protocol, no party gets the output and honest parties can identify at least one common cheater, closing a gap in prior fair-but-unaccountable helper-aided MPC schemes. The authors benchmark against state-of-the-art fair protocols Asterisk and Castor (both from Kamarkar et al., IEEE S&P 2024/2026), showing 4–12.5x and 2.5–5x online-phase speedups respectively, with online performance unaffected by active misbehavior.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026

This IACR eprint paper studies how to allocate a fixed global logical-qubit budget across parallel Grover search workers attacking 80-round and revised 112-round CHAM-128/128, choosing which intermediate round values to retain to minimize circuit depth while meeting a target key-recovery success probability. Testing 83- and 99-set retention libraries against a no-retention/full-retention baseline across 654 budget and Toffoli-decomposition conditions, the authors report mean depth reductions of 11.12% and 8.39% with strict improvements in most conditions, and show retained-value counts don't necessarily scale with budget. The work gives concrete logical-layer resource estimates for quantum attacks on CHAM, relevant to post-quantum migration planning for the lightweight cipher in constrained systems.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026

This IACR ePrint paper breaks Origami, a multivariate post-quantum signature scheme submitted to the NGCC round-1 public-key call, showing its bilinear construction is effectively a Rainbow-type scheme whose central map leaks through the public verification key in a predictable coordinate order. The authors derive an equivalent secret key from the public key alone, enabling universal forgery at roughly the cost of one signature verification (~0.01s at Origami-128), and demonstrate the attack against the unmodified reference implementation across all four parameter sets and the official test vectors. They also refute Origami's security proof by breaking its inversion assumption in a bilinear independent-coefficient model, and note a separate structural flaw where honest signatures lie in a proper subspace rather than the full space the specification assumes.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026

Aggarwal, Morolia, and Stephens-Davidowitz present a new lattice-sieving algorithm for μ-SVP (finding an approximate shortest nonzero vector) that combines fast nearest-neighbor subroutines from heuristic sieving with a perturbation argument that yields a formally proven correctness guarantee. Its running time, roughly 2^0.3066n under a plausible spherical-code-size assumption (and 2^0.6078n using only proven bounds), is far faster than the prior best provable algorithm (2^0.802n, Liu-Wang-Xu-Zheng 2011) and close to the best heuristic rate (~2^0.2925n), narrowing the long-standing gap between proven and heuristic lattice attack runtimes. This matters for setting conservative, defensible hardness estimates and parameter choices in lattice-based post-quantum cryptography.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026

An IACR ePrint paper by Yiming Gao, Xuyuan Han, and Honggang Hu presenting provable classical subexponential algorithms (running in roughly 2^((1/2+o(1))n/ln ln n) time/space) for recovering short secrets in growing parameter families tied to all seven NIST third-round lattice candidates: Kyber/ML-KEM, FrodoKEM, SABER, NTRU LPRime, Dilithium/ML-DSA, Falcon, and cyclic NTRU-HPS/HRSS. The approach extends the Wagner-style Gaussian sampling framework of Ducas, Engelberts, and Loyer (CRYPTO 2025) and a low-error decision-LWE algorithm, using an exact squared-Euclidean-norm gap to binary-search each secret coordinate, and an "affine slice search" over the public lattice for NTRU/Falcon-type quotient relations. The authors explicitly note the subexponential complexity applies to growing/weakened parameter regimes and does not reduce the concrete security of the currently specified NIST parameter sets.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026

An IACR eprint paper proving four of five open conjectures, and disproving the fifth with a counterexample, from Andreoli and colleagues at ToSC 2025 about the linear height and component linear nullity of the inverse of ChiChi, the low latency nonlinear core used in the ChiLow cipher from Eurocrypt 2025 by Belkheyar and colleagues. The authors settle these bounds for all admissible branch lengths of the SWAP and 4-cycle generalizations, derive design consequences for ChiLow, and correct an erroneous data value from the prior work.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026

Truffle is a new three-party maliciously secure shuffle protocol for secure multiparty computation (MPC), matching semi-honest round complexity while adding only sublinear communication via a distributed-verifier zero-knowledge proof checking shuffle correctness. Authors Nidhish Bhimrajka, Yashvanth Kondi, Daniel Noble, and Bhavish Raj Gopal implement and benchmark it, applying it to securely parsing secret-shared strings, with further applications to graph analytics, anonymous communication, Distributed ORAM, aggregate statistics, and secure sorting. Published at ACM CCS 2026.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026

This IACR ePrint paper introduces BPORS-C+BFP, a new few-time signature construction that replaces FORS in SPHINCS+/SLH-DSA, combining short hash chains with a blockwise forced-pruning budget to shrink the bottom signature component. The authors derive a generating-function coverage bound and an exact counting method to safely tighten pruning per block, achieving 8.3%-18.1% smaller full SLH-DSA signatures across six standard parameter sets (versus 3.7%-13.4% for the prior BPORS+FP scheme), and up to 32.5%-36.5% reduction in limited-use settings.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026

An IACR ePrint paper presenting K-LMS, an experimental variant of the NIST-standardized LMS hash-based post-quantum signature scheme in which the underlying hash is swapped for Korean primitives: the LSH-256 hash function (reference and vectorized) and a Tandem-DM double-block-length construction built from the CHAM, LEA, and ARIA block ciphers. The authors implement a non-invasive backend-swapping bridge over the reference LMS code and benchmark keygen/sign/verify latency, key/signature sizes, memory, and parameter sweeps, finding that hash substitution doesn't change key/signature sizes but that two measurement pitfalls (hash dispatch overhead, and software vs. hardware-accelerated SHA-256 baselines) can shift performance comparisons by an order of magnitude or 6x respectively. They report LSH-256 K-LMS signing on par with SHA-256 LMS in software, and 3.3-3.9x faster than a prior K-XMSS implementation because LMS needs fewer hash calls per Winternitz step than XMSS.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026

StOMR is a new "stateful" model for Oblivious Message Retrieval (OMR) — the FHE-based technique letting a recipient scan an untrusted bulletin board for their messages without revealing which ones are theirs, used in anonymous messaging and blockchain privacy. By letting sender and receiver keep lightweight private state (established via a new OMR-KEM key-encapsulation scheme) instead of relying purely on public-key FHE, StOMR shrinks sender-published signals by roughly 550x, 650x, and 178x compared to PerfOMR, SophOMR, and InstantOMR respectively, while matching detector performance; implemented in C++ and published at ACM CCS.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026

An IACR ePrint paper showing that the message-only implicit-rejection KEM variant of the Fujisaki-Okamoto (FO) transform used by ML-KEM is uninstantiable in general (under LWE plus subexponentially secure iO and puncturable PRFs), meaning no concrete hash function can replace the random oracle while preserving IND-CCA2 security for every injective trapdoor function. The authors instead give sufficient conditions, via a new "distributional injective extractability" property, to achieve standard-model IND-CCA2 security for the hybrid-encryption (not KEM) formulation of FO, with a standard-model instantiation left open. This directly bears on the theoretical foundations underlying ML-KEM's security proof.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026

This IACR ePrint paper benchmarks 20 open-source Gröbner basis implementations against the proprietary Magma system on polynomial systems derived from small-scale AES over GF(2), using Easy/Medium/Hard difficulty tiers with ten instances each. In the Hard setting, msolve and Singular's slimgb completed all runs successfully with mean runtimes of 164s and 269s and peak memory of 3693/4343 MiB respectively, versus Magma's 319s and 16853 MiB, with msolve exploiting ~13.4 CPU cores versus ~1 core for the others. The results quantify when open-source algebraic solvers are practical alternatives to Magma for algebraic cryptanalysis of block ciphers.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026

MiniSHAKE is a new family of hash/XOF instances proposed by the Keccak design team (Bertoni, Daemen, Hoffert, Mella, Peeters, Van Assche, Van Keer), built on the smaller Keccak-p[800, nr=12] permutation instead of the standard 1600-bit Keccak-f permutation used by SHA-3/SHAKE. The motivation is efficiency for use cases hashing many very short messages, where the full 1600-bit state is wasteful. The note specifies the construction and naming conventions for these reduced-width instances.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026

IACR ePrint paper constructing and implementing the first one-round threshold signing protocol for the hash-based post-quantum signature schemes XMSS and SPHINCS+, producing signatures that verify unmodified against RFC 8391 and FIPS 205. The approach shares the secret key among t-of-n signing parties and evaluates the signing algorithm homomorphically using threshold FHE over discrete CKKS, achieving 3.4ms amortized per hash and 0.69s online threshold XMSS signing.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026

An IACR ePrint paper presenting a GPU-assisted implementation of FAEST v3 signing, a post-quantum signature scheme, focusing on two problems: preserving the correct minimum accepting counter when parallelizing "challenge grinding" across GPU threads, and building a two-slot CPU-GPU pipeline to overlap CPU work with GPU batches for multi-signature throughput. Across the six non-EM FAEST v3 parameter sets, the authors find the CPU-GPU path beats optimized CPU-only signing for single-sign latency in 4 of 6 cases (up to 1.6x speedup for FAEST-192s) and wins throughput in 9 of 18 parameter/batch-size combinations, with GPU correctness validated to match the reference signature output.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026

IACR ePrint paper presenting hand-written AArch64 NEON assembly implementations of LSH (the Korean standard hash used in K-SPHINCS+), comparing several published optimization techniques and introducing a four-message batched approach that reaches 1.53-2.0x the throughput of sequential KISA reference C code. The authors integrate this batched LSH core into the SPHINCS+ reference framework's WOTS+, FORS and Merkle tree computations to build the first optimized K-SPHINCS+, which signs 2.5-3.2x faster than reference implementations while producing byte-identical signatures across hash backends; all code and measurements are public.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026

This IACR ePrint paper presents a native-Rust, memory-safe implementation of the Korean KpqC competition's standardized post-quantum schemes — KEMs NTRU+ and SMAUG-T, and signatures HAETAE and AIMer — replacing the reference memory-unsafe C code. The authors expose all seven KEM parameter sets and four signature modes through a single pluggable provider demonstrated across three real deployment front-ends: a rustls TLS 1.3 key-exchange group, an OQS/liboqs-compatible C ABI, and an analytical CCSDS/SDLS satellite constrained-link model, showing SMAUG-T variants are smaller/faster than ML-KEM-768 on constrained space links and a memory-optimized NTRU+ build cuts peak stack by up to 25% at negligible latency cost.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026

An IACR ePrint paper benchmarks whether running the classical and post-quantum components of hybrid TLS 1.3 key exchange (ECDHE–ML-KEM) and Composite ML-DSA signatures in parallel on separate pthread worker threads reduces handshake latency versus sequential execution. Across three RFC 10024 ECDHE–ML-KEM groups with server and mutual authentication, parallelism sped up all six tested conditions on a standard ARM and x86 system (1.04×–1.28×), with the largest gains in signature stages where component times are balanced, but slowed every condition on a low-power x86 system (0.80×–0.92×) because thread wake/wait overhead outweighed savings. The authors conclude that component independence alone doesn't guarantee a speedup and that parallelization decisions must be validated per target environment.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026

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eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 4 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026

This IACR ePrint paper introduces zkPoPE (Zero-Knowledge Proof of Protocol Execution), the first transport-agnostic security model for zkTLS, formalized as a UC ideal functionality that separates "proof of an actual protocol execution occurred" from a plain NIZK over input-output pairs. The authors formally analyze the Reclaim Protocol, showing it UC-realizes zkPoPE under a deployment-aligned trust model, and introduce Distributed-AEAD, a new three-party authenticated-encryption primitive enabling Reclaim to attest a 1200kB TLS response on a lower-mid-range phone in 7.28s — two orders of magnitude larger than previously benchmarked zkTLS schemes. It matters because it gives zkTLS constructions (used for privacy-preserving web attestations) a common, construction-independent security definition to be proven against, rather than each scheme inventing its own.

iacr.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026

The CVE Program's official CVE Record lookup page on cve.org. It serves the authoritative record for a given CVE ID, including description, affected products, references and CNA-supplied data. The fetched content was only a cookie consent banner, so the details here are inferred from the URL.

cve.orgtoolAdded 26 Sep 2026

Socket announces it is an inaugural funder of the OpenJS Foundation's new Security Stewardship Program, which pools money to pay both bug bounty researchers and maintainers doing triage, patching, and backporting for Node.js, starting there before expanding across the JS ecosystem. The article frames this against a broader funding crisis: curl suspended its bounty program after AI-generated report floods, GitHub restructured its bounty tiers, Canonical moved Ubuntu kernel updates to weekly releases to keep pace with rising CVE volume, and Node.js paused bounty payouts in April after the Internet Bug Bounty pulled funding, even as HackerOne report volume to the Node.js team spiked 4.6x in one month.

socket.devarticlePublished and added 25 Sep 2026

This paper tightens the soundness bound of the compressed permutation oracle technique (a proof tool for analyzing quantum adversaries against random-permutation/ideal-cipher-based constructions) from O(N^1/12) queries to a tight Ω(N^1/2), using a POVM-based construction of the compression isometry. The improved bound yields concrete quantum collision and preimage lower bounds for the sponge construction underlying SHA3 and the Davies-Meyer compression function used in SHA1 and SHA2, and is offered as a general tool for quantum security proofs involving random permutations or ideal ciphers.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Sep 2026, published 23 Sep 2026

Zero Day Initiative's monthly Apple patch review covers the September 2026 release (macOS 27/Sequoia 15.8/Tahoe 26.7, iOS/iPadOS 27 & 26.7, visionOS, watchOS, tvOS, Safari, Xcode), totaling 273 CVEs. It highlights CVE-2026-65400 (Screen Sharing Server authentication bypass, 9.8 CRITICAL, actively exploited per CISA KEV), CVE-2026-65414 (Bluetooth remote code execution, 9.8 CRITICAL, affecting all eight platforms), and CVE-2026-65346 (ImageIO arbitrary code execution via malicious image, 8.8 HIGH), plus a full CVE-by-component-by-platform table with CVSS scores where NVD/CISA-ADP has assigned them.

zerodayinitiative.comarticleAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 16 Sep 2026

This arXiv paper introduces Tirith, an anti-cheat architecture that runs games inside Protected Virtual Machines instead of trusting kernel-level (ring-0) anti-cheat drivers that root-admin players must install. It uses a virtualization monitor trusted by both players and developers to detect malicious drivers/cheating from outside the sandbox, and proposes a security-focused Library OS and graphics-sharing pipeline to make this practical with near-native performance, aiming to match kernel anti-cheat detection efficacy without the associated user privacy/attack-surface risk of untrusted privileged code.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 16 Sep 2026, published 15 Sep 2026

A deep-dive field guide to choosing between lattice-based (ML-DSA/FN-DSA) and hash-based (SLH-DSA) post-quantum signatures, built from interviews with the designers and implementers behind both NIST standards and their deployments. It walks through Mosca's-inequality-style migration timing, CNSA 2.0's split between lattice signatures and stateful hash-based LMS/XMSS for firmware, the stateful-signature "footgun," and why the broader internet (TLS/WebPKI, via Merkle Tree Certificates) is converging on lattices while Ethereum's post-quantum consensus roadmap (leanXMSS, EIP-8292, EIP-8288 aggregation) and Algorand's live Falcon-1024 state proofs lean hash-based or scheme-neutral because of aggregation and on-chain storage constraints. It closes with a decision framework and a rundown of NIST's round-3 "onramp" signature candidates (MAYO, SQIsign, HAWK, etc.).

ethresear.charticleAdded 3 Oct 2026, published 15 Sep 2026

age is a simple, modern file encryption tool, format, and Go library by Filippo Valsorda and @benjojo, offering small explicit keys, no config options, UNIX-style composability, and now built-in hybrid post-quantum encryption (ML-KEM + X25519) as of v1.3.0. It supports multiple recipients, passphrase encryption, SSH key (ed25519/rsa) recipients/identities, hardware tokens via age-plugin-yubikey, and an age-inspect command to view encrypted-file metadata without decrypting.

github.comrepoAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 31 Aug 2026

Nothing Private is a PHP/MySQL proof-of-concept that uses the ClientJS browser-fingerprinting library to generate a persistent device fingerprint from attributes like user agent, screen resolution, plugin list, font list, timezone, and canvas print, storing it alongside a user-submitted name. It demonstrates that the same fingerprint (and thus identity) can be matched even after switching to private/incognito mode, showing that clearing history does not prevent server-side tracking via fingerprinting.

github.comrepoAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 14 Aug 2026

METR note that plots public discovery data in vulnerabilities, mathematics and algorithmic optimization to look for slope changes around January 2026. CVE counts rose sharply: cURL went from 9 to 36, OpenSSL from 6 to 39, Firefox from 210 to 342, Microsoft from 1,243 to 1,927 through August 2026. Exploited-vulnerability lists (CISA KEV, VulnCheck KEV) grew far less. Math shows weaker acceleration, optimization none.

metr.orgarticleAdded 29 Oct 2026, published 14 Aug 2026

Aikido commentary on Anthropic's public Claude Fable 5 release. The author says it is a Mythos-class model that routes cybersecurity prompts to Opus 4.8, so benchmarking its security capability is pointless. Mythos Preview and Claude Mythos 5 stay limited to Glasswing and about 150 additional organizations. The post argues that vulnerability discovery is roughly 20% of the problem and that zero-day demand is not supply-constrained (about 30 new vulns a month, citing Resecurity). It also argues that CVE and CISA KEV-centric prioritisation is fading, and that AI tokens will mostly go to defensive scanning, exposure management and remediation rather than attacker scans.

aikido.devarticleAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 13 Jun 2026

LUKSbox is an open-source (Apache 2.0), pre-1.0 encrypted vault format and CLI/GUI/TUI toolset written in Rust, designed so files can be stored on untrusted cloud/shared media while remaining opaque to the provider. It layers passphrase, FIDO2 hardware authenticators (hmac-secret), and TPM 2.0 sealed keys as unlock factors that all derive a Master Volume Key via HKDF-SHA256, and adds an optional ML-KEM-768/1024 post-quantum sidecar for hybrid encryption. The project publishes its on-disk format spec, threat model, and side-channel notes, and runs libFuzzer/AFL++ harnesses against every parser that touches attacker-controlled bytes (header, keyslot, metadata, hybrid sidecar, WinFsp paths).

github.comrepoPublished and added 8 May 2026

An essay arguing that security engineering is fundamentally a "context problem": scanners (SAST, cloud posture tools, CVE scanners) are cheap at generating findings but structurally strip the context (asset ownership, reachability, data sensitivity, business criticality) needed to triage them, which is why backlogs of thousands of findings pile up untouched. The author (an independent security advisor) proposes attaching context at detection time rather than triage time, argues hiring should shift toward "fast codebase ramp-up" skills over vulnerability-class knowledge, and frames LLMs as well-suited to the context-gathering legwork (reading code, walking call graphs, correlating tickets) rather than final risk decisions. It's Part 1 of a planned series, with future posts promised on SOC alert triage and AWS/cloud findings specifically.

aseemshrey.inarticlePublished and added 6 May 2026

Presidio is Microsoft's open-source PII de-identification service that detects and anonymizes sensitive entities (credit card numbers, SSNs, names, locations, bitcoin wallets, phone numbers) in text and images, including DICOM medical images. It combines Named Entity Recognition, regex, rule-based logic, and checksum validation, and is deployable via Python, PySpark, Docker, or Kubernetes with pluggable custom recognizers.

github.comrepoPublished and added 6 May 2026

ZEE200 is a new constant-round zero-knowledge proof system for executing arbitrary ANSI C programs, built by combining Tight ZK CPU (Yang et al., CCS'24) and fast ZK RAM (Yang and Heath, USENIX Security'24) with new Z_2^32 encodings and low-level optimizations. It runs its ZK CPU at ~200 KHz versus the prior ZEE system's ~10 KHz, and reproduces ZEE's benchmark of proving a SIR-reported vulnerability in the Linux sed utility in 1.5 seconds instead of 30.1 seconds on a simulated 1Gbps LAN with a commodity laptop. This lets a researcher prove the existence of a specific bug in real-world software without revealing the exploiting input, with far lower performance overhead than prior ZK-execution toolchains.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 28 Apr 2026