a blog about cryptography, math software and kittens
Our paper A Real-World Law-Enforcement Hack: The Case of Encrochat has been accepted to CRYPTO 2026 and the full version is available; “us” is Sunoo Park, Mike Specter, Douglas Stebila and me. Here’s the abstract: In 2020, a coordinated law-enforcement effort infiltrated Encrochat, an end-to-end encrypted service provider, exfiltrating historical and real-time data and metadata Continue reading A…
Our (Russell W. F. Lai, Eamonn W. Postlethwaite and me) work titled Hardness of hinted ISIS from the space-time hardness of lattice problems has been accepted to CRYPTO 26. Here’s the abstract: We initiate the study of basing the hardness of hinted ISIS problems (i.e. with trapdoor information, or ‘hints’) on the previously conjectured space-time hardness Continue reading Hardness of hinted ISIS…
Our work – “At-Compromise Security: The Case for Alert Blindness” – was accepted at EUROCRYPT 2026; with “us” being Simone Colombo, Benjamin Dowling, Rikke Bjerg Jensen and, well, me. Abstract. We start from the observation in prior work that cryptography broadly intuits security goals – as modelled in games or ideal functionalities – while claiming Continue reading “Based on these ethnographic…
We re hosting an Autumn School in London, UK, from 15 to 17 September 2026, to bring together ethnographers and cryptographers to discuss ways in which the two fields can be meaningfully brought into conversation. This is also the premise of our Social Foundations of Cryptography project: to ground cryptography in ethnography. Here, we rely on Continue reading Social Foundations of Cryptography:…
We are looking to recruit a lecturer in cryptography at King’s College London to work with us within the cybersecurity group: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/134305-lecturer-in-cryptography I think it’s fair to say we got strong expertise in lattice-based and post-quantum cryptography here, as well as in protocols with an applied cryptography bent. Check out our publications to get a Continue reading…
Eamonn and I are looking to hire an intern for four months to work on the Lattice Estimator. The internship will be based at King’s College London and is funded by a gift from Zama. We are ideally looking for someone in a PhD programme also working on lattice cryptanalysis who is happy to interrupt Continue reading Internship Position on the Lattice Estimator
We are recruiting a postdoc to work with us on “practical advanced post-quantum cryptography from lattices”, the title of my ERC selected, UKRI Frontier Research funded project: Standardisation efforts for post-quantum public-key encryption and signatures are close to completion. At the same time the most recent decade has seen the deployment, at scale, of more Continue reading Postdoc Position in…
Our paper – titled “On the Virtues of Information Security in the UK Climate Movement” – was accepted at USENIX Security’25. Here’s the abstract: We report on an ethnographic study with members of the climate movement in the United Kingdom (UK). We conducted participant observation and interviews at protests and in various activist settings. Reporting Continue reading On the Virtues of Information…
Together with Rikke Jensen, we’re organising a talk and discussion with Jean-François Blanchette in London on his book Burdens of Proof, which has been tremendously influential on our thinking around the social foundations of cryptography. Title Yeah yeah yeah he has a thing about steganography: Mathematical formalism, disciplinary boundaries, and cryptography’s design culture Blurb…
Together with Lenka Mareková, Kenny Paterson, Eyal Ronen and Igors Stepanovs, we have finally completed our (first, formal, in-depth, computational) analysis of the Telegram key exchange. This work is going to be presented at Eurocrypt 2025 in Madrid. Abstract. We describe, formally model, and prove the security of Telegram s key exchange protocols for client-server communications. Continue…