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At Devcon 8 in Mumbai, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake said he hopes the network's post-quantum and post-AI transition could be completed by December 2028, a year ahead of the foundation's official December 2029 roadmap deadline. He described this as an aspiration, not a formal commitment, noting it would require shipping three network upgrades within 24 months after an expected early-2027 milestone.
Kaspersky researchers identified a Lazarus Group operation, dubbed FlashHole, that uses the ML-KEM-1024 post-quantum cryptographic standard to secure communications between malware and its command-and-control servers. The campaign, active since July 2025, uses phishing pages linked to crafted GitHub sites to trigger a multi-stage infection chain involving tools like LPEClient, TechHub, and ClientHub, with at least three South Korean firms in software, construction, and telecom equipment confirmed as targets.
Nature's daily briefing describes how hobbyist codebreakers are using AI tools, including OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, to solve historical encrypted messages, such as WWII-era German military ciphers. One user reportedly used the model to find a key to an unsolved 1809 cipher in about six hours. Cryptography experts say the surge of interest is welcome but has also led to a flood of requests to verify AI-generated solutions, some of which turn out to be wrong.
A technical explainer breaks down how AES relies on GF(2^8), a finite field with 256 elements first theorized by mathematician Évariste Galois. It shows how numbers in this field correspond to polynomials with binary coefficients, and demonstrates that addition, subtraction, and XOR all become the same operation due to single-bit wraparound.
Anthropic reports that its Claude AI model helped determine the origin of mysterious 'seed' values used to generate NIST's standard elliptic curves for ECDSA, a widely used cryptographic signature standard. The seeds, published without explanation by the NSA in 2000, were long rumored to derive from a humorous passphrase chosen by NSA employee Jerry Solinas, but the analysis found they actually correspond to UTC timestamps.
In this reprinted 1991 guide (updated 1999), Phil Zimmermann describes why he built Pretty Good Privacy, arguing that email and electronic communication lack the inherent privacy once guaranteed by face-to-face conversation. He contends that government surveillance of digital communication is far cheaper and easier than intercepting paper mail or phone calls, prompting him to create software letting ordinary people encrypt their messages.
OpenAI published 722 manuscripts and proofs addressing longstanding mathematical problems, generated by an unnamed internal frontier AI model, with only 300 results formalized for computer verification. Researchers who reviewed the work told The Verge they found nonsensical explanations, malformed formulas, and results that duplicated existing research, while OpenAI withheld the model's identity and the prompts used to generate the findings.
A writer reflects on reading Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 short story 'The Gold-Bug' as a middle schooler in India, describing how it introduced them to cryptography through a tale of a buried pirate treasure decoded from symbols. The essay notes Poe wrote the story around 1840, submitted it to a Philadelphia newspaper contest, won $100, and had it published in 1843, making it likely the oldest fiction to feature cryptography.
Latacora has published a revised version of its long-running 'Cryptographic Right Answers' developer guide, updating recommendations in light of an accelerated post-quantum cryptography transition timeline that now targets completion by 2029. The guide states symmetric cryptography remains largely unaffected by quantum threats, but nearly all asymmetric recommendations have changed since the 2018 and 2024 editions. It also now recommends getting cryptographic code reviewed by capable LLMs alongside using memory-safe languages.
Forescout Technologies analyzed roughly 2.5 million devices across more than 50 healthcare organizations and found widespread gaps in support for post-quantum cryptography. Only about half of IT devices supported SSH implementations capable of PQC, versus 16% of operational technology and just 6% of Internet of Medical Things devices such as patient monitors and insulin pumps. The firm also found over 5,500 Internet-reachable systems holding medical records and imaging data, only 31% of which used TLS 1.3, the protocol needed for current PQC standards.
Hundred Rabbits announced the launch of a new page on their Rabbit Waves site, teaching how to encrypt messages with One-Time Pads. They also released a revamped version of Donsol, featuring animated sprites and an in-game manual, accessible via browser or Uxn emulator. Additionally, Devine was invited to Oredev 2026 to discuss software archiving, and the organization engaged in social activities and language coding exercises during August and September 2026.
Cryptography researchers demonstrated a method to forge certain RSA signatures without recovering the private key, using a variant of the special number field sieve algorithm combined with an oracle found in some blind-signature protocols. The attack is practical against deprecated 1,024-bit keys and reduces the estimated security margin of 2,048-bit and 4,096-bit keys in vulnerable blind-signature systems, while standard RSA implementations using PKCS or PSS padding appear unaffected.