🎉 Proud moment for COSIC! Prof. Nigel Smart has received the #RSAC 2026 Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics for his groundbreaking work in #MPC, Threshold #Cryptography & foundational crypto research. Congratulations, Nigel! 👏
www.rsaconference.com/library/pres...
A very nice blogpost explaining our work - slices right through the marketing from the vendors: medium.com/reading-sh/y...
Call for submissions: #TPMPC2026 (Theory & Practice of MPC)
Submit your latest and coolest results by March 2, 2026.
Aarhus, Denmark, May 18–22, 2026.
Monday: MPC security in practice.
Friday: Symposium celebrating Ivan Damgård’s work.
Links in comments.
Cartoon showing a street in the rain. A man on a bike is delivering food, while another courier is delivering packages from Amazon. Two other workers are collecting garbage. Inside one of the houses on the street, we see robots labeled 'AI' sitting dry and warm, engaged in making a paining, playing the violin and writing.
The robot apocalypse hasn't happened yet, but still I can't escape the feeling that something has gone horribly wrong... Cartoon for Dutch newspaper @trouw.nl.
More of my work for Trouw: www.trouw.nl/cartoons/tje...
#ArtificialIntelligence #creativity #work #GenerativeAI
Person: say, i am alive. Computer: I am alive. Person: oh my god.
The number of people arguing, following the #NeurIPS2025 case, that a bit of systematically bad scholarship and borderline academic misconduct is OK because doing things the right way is tedious and time-consuming is concerning.
Yes, doing things well might be boring. But doing them badly is... bad
Consider signing this petition regarding restoring free access to the ACM digital library: www.ipetitions.com/petition/res...
Deadline is January 7. Still a few days left to apply...
Privacy issues are unlikely to go away in 2026. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...
The latest version of MP-SPDZ can predict the communication cost when compiling high-level code. github.com/data61/MP-SP...
Fully robust MPC protocol over Galois Rings, executing a TFHE DKG protocol amongst 13 parties, taking 55 hours, with 10.5 Terabytes of data sent per party....
www.zama.org/post/decentr...
Come work with Peter Scholl @schollster.bsky.social and me in Aarhus!
Cryptography shows that AI filters will never work....
www.quantamagazine.org/cryptographe...
Nice application of crypto to AI, and shows that AI has inherent limitations.
If you swap each letter in “bomb” with the next letter in the alphabet, you’ll get “cpnc.” Recently, scientists showed that and other methods can bypass filters on LLMs like Gemini, DeepSeek and Grok. @peterha2l.bsky.social reports: www.quantamagazine.org/cryptographe...
On the internet, age verification doesn't know you're a dog.
"Maybe the name EasyCrypt isn't quite deserved." - @cryptojedi.bsky.social at his Asiacrypt keynote
Interested in the security of MPC implementations?
Peter Scholl (@schollster.bsky.social) and I are looking for research interns to study the theory/practice gap for MPC. We can host multiple interns in Aarhus for the summer 2026.
More information: mpcinthewild.github.io
Help us spread the word!
📢 Announcing hacklore.org 📢
It’s time to retire outdated cyber advice! More than 80 cybersecurity veterans have signed an open letter urging a shift from folklore to guidance that actually helps people avoid the most common attacks. 🔐
Blog: medium.com/@boblord/let...
Site: www.hacklore.org
At least they make it easy to find out why. It seems they confuse you with Moni Naor on this CiC paper: openalex.org/works/W44092...
One of the motivations for MP-SPDZ was not getting bogged down by this kind of arguments when they are just hypothetical. Every use case has its own trade-offs as the IACR just found out.
Just saw an extended version
This is a nuts story. An AI chatbot and image platform left millions of images exposed. They show what people are actually using the AI for: taking random women's yearbook, graduation, and social media photos and making super realistic hardcore porn with them
www.404media.co/ai-porn-secr...
NEW: The US Department of Justice issued a warrant demanding SpaceX seize and disable Starlink devices and accounts being used at a scam compound in Myanmar.
At least 9 Starlink devices were linked to a crypto scam that stole $6 million people, an FBI affidavit says
Story with @lhn.bsky.social
A staggering statistic: "North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year." What are we doing?
Thanks to Hidde Lycklama, MP-SPDZ now supports BERT inference. github.com/data61/MP-SP...
Slide is titled: You don't need to use LLMs. Science is a process of collaborative meaning making, by which we try to understand the world Even if AI were perfect, we rely on it at our peril — it is not science if we (i.e., humanity as a whole) do not understand and cannot recapitulate all parts of it I very, very rarely use LLMs myself. You can give yourself permission not to. Don’t FOMO yourself into it
Conclusion: Don't rely on something you don't understand and can't control If you must use LLMS: 1. Treat them like you would an intern: only use them for things you can easily and thoroughly check 2. Make your process as robust as possible 3. Be aware of your own (human) cognitive biases
Getting nervous for the talk I'm about to give at a workshop about "using AI to drive impact" which features slides such as these.
Remarkable, but important to notice that the change only applies to review/survey and position papers
