Let’s talk about AI and end-to-end encryption

This blog is reserved for more serious things, and ordinarily I wouldn’t spend time on questions like the above. But much as I’d like to spend my time writing about exciting topics, sometimes the world requires a bit of what Brad Delong calls “Intellectual Garbage Pickup,” namely: correcting wrong, or mostly-wrong ideas that spread unchecked …...

Update (April 19): Yilei Chen announced the discovery of a bug in the algorithm, which he does not know how to fix. This was independently discovered by Hongxun Wu and Thomas Vidick. At present, the paper does not provide a polynomial-time algorithm for solving LWE. If you’re a normal person — that is, a person … Continue reading A quick post on...

It’s been a while since I wrote an “attack of the week” post, and the fault for this is entirely mine. I’ve been much too busy writing boring posts about Schnorr signatures! But this week’s news brings an exciting story with both technical and political dimensions: new reports claim that Chinese security agencies have developed … Continue reading...

This post continues a long, wonky discussion of Schnorr signature schemes and the Dilithium post-quantum signature. You may want to start with Part 1. In the previous post I discussed the intuition behind Schnorr signatures, beginning with a high-level design rationale and ending with a concrete instantiation. As a reminder: our discussion began...

Warning: extremely wonky cryptography post. Also, possibly stupid and bound for nowhere. One of the hardest problems in applied cryptography (and perhaps all of computer science!) is explaining why our tools work the way they do. After all, we’ve been gifted an amazing basket of useful algorithms from those who came before us. Hence it’s …...