"but AI is good at math now!" Yeah, you know who else is good, arguably even a lot better at math? Humans. Volume in proved statements isn't going to get you the type of complexity theory shattering results that you'd need to break public key cryptography. Yes AI is advancing at fast speeds […]

Oh God, this is getting even worse: apparently the "source" of the claim that AI might have broken classical cryptography is the fact that some numbers are skipped in the OpenAI math dump. You know, that same dump that doesn't even have formal verification on more than half of the results and […]

I am an incredibly minor public figure. One thing that, even at my incredibly narrow status, I learned, is to not speculate on main, when you have absolutely zero evidence to back up any of your speculation. Unfortunately not everyone in this position has learned that lesson. In case you've […]

Outfits for the lesser known sequel to "four weddings and one funeral": "two conferences and one wedding"

Complex software behaving in unexpected and sometimes harmful ways has been a persistent problem since software was invented. The phenomenon used to be called “bugs” or “defects”, but I guess “going rogue” sounds cooler. It also implicitly frames “rogue” behavior as some kind of inexplicable […]

LEGO vending machine

Whenever I'm attending a US government event, I make a mental list of various archetypes. As far as I can tell there are: - government employees who "accidentally" say DoD most of the time, but throw in the occasional DoW as plausible deniability - government employees who proudly and […]

Someone pointed out to me that the IACR election thing, where a party lost their decryption key and so we had to do a do over actually demonstrated the feasibility of a repudiation attack on the bottom system: a single party should not unilaterally be able to force the election to be invalidated […]

Maybe we can define a PQC signature that kills the very concept of a middle box itself. Like on a platonic ideal level.

Why are middle boxes?

I see, when NIST considers 6 bit a rounding error offset by memory cost, they basically claim that 2⁴⁰ + 2⁴⁰ = 2⁸⁰, but when someone reduces the attack cost of Classic McEliece to substantially below 2¹²⁸, memory suddenly is very important and means that the work should be dismissed.

"AHA! I've figured it out! You just like to eat air!" @saraislet commenting on my preferences for sparkling water, latte macchiato with lots of foam, and Torte (aka cake with plentiful whipped cream)

The prompt was "how I explain my job to my family". My first version "well, you're both solid state physicists, you know what a lattice is, just add 765 dimensions to the stuff you've worked on" was sadly rejected.