The International Association of Cryptologic Research—the academic cryptography association that’s been putting conferences like Crypto (back when “crypto” meant “cryptography”) and Eurocrypt since the 1980s—had to nullify an online election when trustee Moti Yung lost his decryption key. > For this election and in accordance with the bylaws of the IACR, the three > members of the IACR 2025 Election Committee acted as independent trustees, > each holding a portion of the cryptographic key material required to jointly > decrypt the results. This aspect of Helios’ design ensures that no two > trustees could collude to determine the outcome of an election or the contents > of individual votes on their own: all trustees must provide their decryption > shares...

New paper: “GPU Assisted Brute Force Cryptanalysis of GPRS, GSM, RFID, and TETRA: Brute Force Cryptanalysis of KASUMI, SPECK, and TEA3.” > Abstract: Key lengths in symmetric cryptography are determined with respect to > the brute force attacks with current technology. While nowadays at least > 128-bit keys are recommended, there are many standards and real-world > applications that use shorter keys. In order to estimate the actual threat > imposed by using those short keys, precise estimates for attacks are crucial. > > In this work we provide optimized implementations of several widely used > algorithms on GPUs, leading to interesting insights on the cost of brute force > attacks on several real-word applications...