Headlines pulled automatically from NIST, IACR, and trusted security news outlets, refreshed every few hours. Titles and excerpts only — click through to read the full story at the original source.
A malicious ChatGPT share link could run an attacker's code in the logged-in session of anyone who opened it, allowing them to read their private conversations, researchers at the security firm Parameter showed. The researchers reported the flaw through OpenAI's bug bounty program on October 18, and OpenAI fixed it eight days later and rated it P1, its most serious category.
Chinese state-sponsored threat actors have been observed using a Go-based artificial intelligence (AI)-powered penetration testing framework called ARTEX in attacks aimed at high-value targets simultaneously. The activity has been attributed by CrowdStrike to a China-based "targeted intrusion adversary" it tracks under the moniker Vapor Panda (previously VexatiousTemper). First identified in
I ricercatori non riescono a spiegare del tutto perché le minacce informatiche in Italia siano così diverse rispetto a quelle di qualsiasi altro Paese.
Cisco released security updates to patch a denial-of-service zero-day in Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) and Threat Defense (FTD) software that attackers are exploiting to remotely crash vulnerable firewall devices. [...]
Hackers exploited a critical Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN flaw, fixed in February, to plant custom malware inside the systems that control an organization's SD-WAN network. The malware, called KeyDrift, is designed to copy the keys that encrypt traffic between sites and store them for later use, Cisco Talos said on October 28. Talos calls the attacks historical but does not specify when they
In this work, we study (multivariate) polynomial evaluation datastructures, i.e. algorithms that can evaluate a multivariate polynomial at any input point, using random access to some precomputed encoding of the polynomial. Multiple constructions have been proposed in the literature, with the work by Bhargava, Ghosh, Guo, Kumar and Umans (2024) achieving optimal datastructure size and query compl…
We revisit scalar multiplication on prime curves $y^2 = x^3 + b$ with $p \equiv 1 \pmod 3$, the family including secp256k1, BN, and BLS curves. We apply a 15-year-old technique in a novel way to improve the best complete addition from $12$ to $11$ multiplications (or $10$ for mixed coordinates) for the first time in 10 years: its final stage is a 3D cross product, which needs only five multiplica…
Private Information Retrieval (PIR) allows a client to retrieve an entry of a database while revealing no information about the requested index to the servers. Classic information-theoretic PIR protocols of Chor et al. (FOCS '95, JACM '98) and Ambainis (ICALP '97) achieve sublinear client computation and communication complexity with a constant number of servers, but require each server to perfor…
Lattice-based cryptography uses SHAKE to expand seeds into byte strings for matrix generation and sampling. SIMD Keccak implementations process multiple hash streams in parallel. Differences in stream lengths and input dependencies can prevent full SIMD utilization. We present a cost-aware method for scheduling Keccak permutations across hash streams during a single execution of a cryptographic a…
The threat actor lurked behind bots posing as agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and others to find exposed data.
Identity-based encryption (IBE) is required to support a superpolynomial-size identity space using only polynomial-size public parameters. This compression requirement underlies known barriers to IBE in the generic (pairing-free) group model. Cryptographic group actions, motivated prominently by isogeny-based cryptography, support many advanced primitives beyond public-key encryption. However, no…
We present an end-to-end resource estimation of Shor's algorithm on superconducting cat qubits, from its mathematical description to the allocation and scheduling of physical qubits on a chip layout. After proposing a comprehensive view of the modern versions of Shor's algorithm for RSA, ECDLP and FFDLP, we make explicit their logical circuits and the trade-offs they enable. We compile the domina…
In 2011 we observed that a single path in the Keccak sponge from a state whose capacity has all zero bits back to such a state yields an explicit, infinite family of second preimages for every message of at least one full rate block. Finding such a path costs about 2^(c/2), which lies "beyond the event horizon" for SHA3-256 (c=512). In this paper we give three novel theorems around that observati…
Rerandomizable garbling schemes (RGS) are a fundamental primitive enabling advanced cryptographic constructions such as multi-hop homomorphic encryption (Gentry, Halevi, Vaikuntanathan, CRYPTO 2010), iO-combiners (Ananth, Jain, Naor, Sahai, Yogev, CRYPTO 2016), and YOSO-style MPC (Acharya, Hazay, Kolesnikov, Prabhakaran, TCC 2022 and CRYPTO 2024). All known RGS instantiations rely on discrete-log…
We study quantum collision finding for functions of prescribed exact type. For fixed constants $k\ge r\ge2$ and $N=kn$, consider functions $f:[N]\to\mathbb Z_q$ of type $(k^n)$, with exactly $n$ distinct output values and $k$ preimages for each value. We prove that the worst-case bounded-error quantum query complexity of finding $r$-collisions in $\ell$ distinct equality classes is \[ \Theta_{k,r…
Microsoft has released out-of-band (OOB) Windows updates to remove trust in certificates tied to compromised eMudhra certificate authority keys, protecting systems that do not receive automatic certificate trust updates. [...]
Oscillator-based true random number generators derive randomness from timing fluctuations driven by thermal and flicker noise, and flicker gains weight as technology advances and transistors shrink. Its long memory leaks information about past, which existing models either discard or truncate, overstating security. We introduce a rigorous and tractable framework for colored noise, including the w…
Radical isogeny formulae compute a cyclic chain of $N$-isogenies with one $N$th root per step and without sampling torsion points, but for general $N$ they were only known in Tate normal form. We give radical steps of every odd degree $N$ directly on short Weierstrass, Montgomery, twisted Edwards, Huff, extended Jacobi quartic, twisted Hessian, Legendre and Jacobi intersection curves, on Kummer l…
The GoAhead embedded web server loaded a certificate revocation list into its default TLS backend but never turned revocation checking on, so a revoked client certificate could still pass login on affected setups. The flaw is in builds that use the OpenSSL backend with mutual-TLS, where the server checks a client certificate and vice versa, and a revocation list is configured to block revoked
Side-Channel Analysis is an established field of research to assess implementation vulnerabilities of cryptographic algorithms. One typically exploited side-channel is the electromagnetic (EM) near-field, which is proportional to the data-dependent currents flowing through an Integrated Circuit (IC). The field of Quantum Sensing (QS) based on Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV) centers has shown promising appr…
The North Korea-linked Lazarus Group has been attributed to a cyber espionage campaign dubbed Operation FlashHole targeting at least three organizations in South Korea spanning the construction, software, and wire-communication equipment manufacturing sectors. According to Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky, the campaign has been active since at least July 2025. It's assessed to pick up
Interesting research: “AI Models Can Provably Hide Arbitrary Capabilities” Abstract: Capability evaluations aim to surface dangerous model behaviors before deployment, but their reliability depends on the assumption that hidden capabilities can be elicited. We show this assumption does not hold under adversarial conditions by constructing backdoor attacks that embed encrypted neural n…
Secure aggregation lets clients reveal only an aggregate of their private contributions, supporting a variety of applications, including privacy-preserving sensing, collaborative analytics, and federated learning. Building on the single-server, committee-aided model for one-shot clients used by OPA and Willow~(CRYPTO~'25), we present Ossa, a generic construction with a modular security analysis. …
OpenAI's compaction feature, which shrinks a long conversation to save space, could be turned into a way to copy a model's hidden reasoning out in plain text, security firm Xint has shown. OpenAI's reasoning models work through a problem before answering, and the service normally returns only the raw reasoning as an encrypted item the user cannot read. The method got past
Shuffling is a standard hiding countermeasure against (single-trace) side-channel attacks on the number-theoretic transform (NTT) of lattice-based post-quantum schemes, such as ML-DSA. The Fisher-Yates algorithm can be used to generate the underlying random permutation. Recovering this permutation itself from a single trace has so far only been studied for short sequences. We present a practical …
We present Poly2MsgLeaks, a profiled chosen-ciphertext power-analysis attack that recovers the complete 512-coefficient public-key encryption (PKE) secret of SMAUG-T in its TiMER parameter set. Each polynomial-to-message (P2M) decision depends on four ternary secret coefficients and therefore on one of 81 local states. We characterize all admissible P2M predicates and show that our six-query sche…
Falcon and the forthcoming FN-DSA standard based on it generate signatures via discrete Gaussian sampling, during which power consumption leaks information about secret-dependent intermediate values. While prior attacks exploit sampler leakages individually or in pairs, we present a unified key-recovery framework that fuses three observations from each SamplerZ call: the signed-exponent class e(k…
The rapid deployment of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) within Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) has opened up new privacy concerns. Both sensitive graph data and proprietary GNN models are submitted to and processed in third-party MLaaS platform for training and inference. To alleviate those concerns, recent efforts have been made to design tailored secure computation protocols for GNNs. Unfort…
The hint framework of Dachman-Soled, Ducas, Gong, and Rossi (CRYPTO 2020), together with the later too-many-hints analyses from May and Nowakowski (ASIACRYPT 2023) and Cao, Jiang, and Cheng (CRYPTO 2025), gives a classification of secret-dependent hints and LLL-breaking hint thresholds for LWE schemes. These values are now frequently adopted as the default benchmark for side-channel security eval…
The constant-time programming policy is a de facto standard for cryptographic libraries to prevent timing side-channel attacks. However, compiler optimizations may break constant-time source code during compilation. Systematically preventing this requires understanding where a violation arises, how it is introduced, and which compiler configurations are problematic. Existing approaches analyze a …
The contribution vector (convec) of a secret-sharing scheme is the vector of its normalized share sizes. The average and maximum coordinates of a convec give, respectively, the average and maximum information ratios of the scheme. Obtaining superlinear lower bounds on these quantities for unrestricted perfect secret sharing has remained a challenging open problem for about four decades. In this p…
Kushilevitz, Lindell, and Rabin (STOC `06, SIAM Journal on Computing `10), in their seminal result, showed that any standalone-secure synchronous multiparty computation (MPC) protocol can be compiled into one secure under concurrent general composition, by adding a synchronisation step after every round; thereby, at least doubling the round complexity. We show that for protocols that are secure a…
Robust combiners are a standard way to hedge cryptographic assumptions: given several candidate constructions, they produce one construction that remains secure as long as one candidate is secure. In favorable cases, such combiners also yield universal constructions. We ask whether this paradigm applies to cryptographic primitives whose public outputs must be both pseudorandom and sparse. Our fir…
We present a security analysis of the messaging service known as LINE, a popular platform used daily by millions of users in East and Southeast Asia – most notably Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia. More specifically, we focus on its underlying custom end-to-end encryption (E2EE) protocol, known as Letter Sealing v2. Our findings show that Letter Sealing allows a TLS Machine-in-the- Middle a…
We review the Bulletproofs++ construction which replaces the bit-decomposition inner-product argument of Bulletproofs with a reciprocal set-membership argument over base-$16$ digits. We present a self-contained specification of the $64$-bit range proof as well as a general batched variant parametric in the batch size $M$ and bit width $b$ and prove honest-verifier zero-knowledge and exact-form kn…
ZMAC+ is a tweakable-block-cipher-based MAC proposed by List and Nandi in ToSC 2017 with claimed beyond-birthday-bound security. We show that a tag-swap mechanism previously observed for a hypothetical two-output extension of DoveMAC also applies to the published ZMAC+ construction. For two-block tags, we give a distinguisher with constant advantage and a fresh-message forgery with constant succe…
Provers for succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (SNARKs) perform arithmetic over a large field for soundness, even when the witness entries are a few bits wide, which inflates both prover time and memory usage. Recent work makes individual SNARK components bitwidth-aware, so that a lower witness bitwidth means faster proving and lower memory usage, but these techniques cover only part…
Despite ensuring both consistency and liveness, state machine replication (SMR) protocols remain vulnerable to adversaries that manipulate transaction order, causing, e.g., MEV attacks. To mitigate this, researchers have proposed new variants augmented with order-fairness. However, existing protocols that employ dependency graphs, such as Aequitas (Crypto 2020), Themis (CCS 2023), and SpeedyFair …
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a Microsoft 365 campaign that has been observed leveraging an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) relay to capture sign-in sessions and then replay the stolen tokens to break into email accounts at 79 organizations. Huntress, which observed the activity between July 14 and September 22, 2026, said it detected 497 successful Microsoft 365 sign-in events across
The question of obtaining a constant-additive approximation for bin packing was highlighted in the third of ten open problems in Williamson and Shmoys' The Design of Approximation Algorithms [SW11, Chapter~17, Problem~3]. We prove that there is an absolute constant $c>0$ such that, unless $\mathrm P=\mathrm{NP}$, no deterministic polynomial-time packing using at most $\mathrm{OPT}+c\log^*\mathrm{…