Encryption

IACR Nullifies Election Because of Lost Decryption Key

The International Association of Cryptologic Research—the academic cryptography association that’s been putting conferences like Crypto (back when “crypto” meant “cryptography”) and Eurocrypt since the 1980s—had to nullify an online election when trustee Moti Yung lost his decryption key.

For this election and in accordance with the bylaws of the IACR, the three members of the IACR 2025 Election Committee acted as independent trustees, each holding a portion of the cryptographic key material required to jointly decrypt the results. This aspect of Helios’ design ensures that no two trustees could collude to determine the outcome of an election or the contents of individual votes on their own: all trustees must provide their decryption shares…

November 24, 2025
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Book Review: The Business of Secrets

The Business of Secrets: Adventures in Selling Encryption Around the World by Fred Kinch (May 24, 2024)

From the vantage point of today, it’s surreal reading about the commercial cryptography business in the 1970s. Nobody knew anything. The manufacturers didn’t know whether the cryptography they sold was any good. The customers didn’t know whether the crypto they bought was any good. Everyone pretended to know, thought they knew, or knew better than to even try to know.

The Business of Secrets is the self-published memoirs of Fred Kinch. He was founder and vice president of—mostly sales—at a US cryptographic hardware company called Datotek, from company’s founding in 1969 until 1982. It’s mostly a disjointed collection of stories about the difficulties of selling to governments worldwide, along with descriptions of the highs and (mostly) lows of foreign airlines, foreign hotels, and foreign travel in general. But it’s also about encryption…

November 13, 2025
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Signal’s Post-Quantum Cryptographic Implementation

Signal has just rolled out its quantum-safe cryptographic implementation.

Ars Technica has a really good article with details:

Ultimately, the architects settled on a creative solution. Rather than bolt KEM onto the existing double ratchet, they allowed it to remain more or less the same as it had been. Then they used the new quantum-safe ratchet to implement a parallel secure messaging system.

Now, when the protocol encrypts a message, it sources encryption keys from both the classic Double Ratchet and the new ratchet. It then mixes the two keys together (using a cryptographic key derivation function) to get a new encryption key that has all of the security of the classical Double Ratchet but now has quantum security, too…

October 29, 2025
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A Surprising Amount of Satellite Traffic Is Unencrypted

Here’s the summary:

We pointed a commercial-off-the-shelf satellite dish at the sky and carried out the most comprehensive public study to date of geostationary satellite communication. A shockingly large amount of sensitive traffic is being broadcast unencrypted, including critical infrastructure, internal corporate and government communications, private citizens’ voice calls and SMS, and consumer Internet traffic from in-flight wifi and mobile networks. This data can be passively observed by anyone with a few hundred dollars of consumer-grade hardware. There are thousands of geostationary satellite transponders globally, and data from a single transponder may be visible from an area as large as 40% of the surface of the earth…

October 17, 2025
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Outdated encryption leaves crypto wide open

The cryptocurrency sector faces an existential threat on two fronts: none of the 2,138 web applications and 146 mobile apps tested by ImmuniWeb support post-quantum encryption, and more than 7.8 million user records are already circulating on the dark …

October 9, 2025
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OpenSSL 3.6.0: New features, crypto support

The OpenSSL Project has announced the release of OpenSSL 3.6.0, a feature update that brings significant functionality improvements, standards compliance, and a few key deprecations that developers and security teams will need to keep in mind. Key cryp…

October 2, 2025
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