Christopher Patton

Policy, privacy and post-quantum: anonymous credentials for everyone The world is adopting anonymous credentials for digital privacy, but these systems are vulnerable to quantum computers. This post explores the cryptographic challenges and promising research paths tow...

Anonymous credentials are going to have a big year. In the realm of "fancy" cryptography, they're perhaps the most important primitive we'll need to make PQ. Where do we stand? Lena Heimberger spent part of the summer finding out.
blog.cloudflare.com/pq-anonymous...

Anonymous credentials- rate-limiting bots and agents without compromising privacy As AI agents change how the Internet is used, they create a challenge for security. We explore how Anonymous Credentials can rate limit agent traffic and block abuse without tracking users or compromi...

Web servers need better tools to manage agentic traffic. Fortunately, we can build these tools in a way that protects the privacy of the human in the loop.
blog.cloudflare.com/private-rate...

Keeping the Internet fast and secure- introducing Merkle Tree Certificates Cloudflare is launching an experiment with Chrome to evaluate fast, scalable, and quantum-ready Merkle Tree Certificates, all without degrading performance or changing WebPKI trust relationships.

The road ahead is long, but we have a plan to get PQ signatures into TLS. Let me know what you think, or come yell at us at the PLANTS BoF at IETF next week!

Improving the trustworthiness of Javascript on the Web Today, there's no way to audit a site’s client-side code as it changes, making it hard to trust sites that use cryptography. We preview a specification we coauthored that adds auditability to the web.

Looking to improve auditability of Web applications blog.cloudflare.com/improving-th...

There's a weird chronenberg alien monster parasite is chilling in some dude's burnt rib cage, getting phasered in the face

Classic Star Trek moments that should definitely be made into Magic the Gathering cards 🧵

Picard saying the line, "I do not fire on defenseless people."

The bad guy's plan falls apart because it relies on tricking the crew to fire on a helpless ship. Picard may not have memories, but he still has morals.

"I do not fire on defenseless people" should be the absolute floor for ethics in military leadership, but the 1990's were a different time

Jessica given the water of life "its tylenol" with the reverend mother saying "you should have told us youre pregnant!"

I assume this happened to all of you.

You don’t need quantum hardware for post-quantum security Post-quantum cryptography protects against quantum threats using today’s hardware. Quantum tech like QKD may sound appealing, but it isn’t necessary or sufficient to secure organizations.

"Lack of scalability is enough for Cloudflare to disqualify QKD outright: if a technology can’t bring security to the whole Internet, we’re not going to spend much time on it."

blog.cloudflare.com/you-dont-nee...

Yup

He's lucky to have a CS professor as a dad!

This was not me, but I'm glad to hear there's at least one more Chris Patton out there :)

Last days of summer scenes, Kenai River Alaska.

Even the strongest among us feel weak at times. Even the smartest of us feel stupid at times. Even the most confident feel doubt. There is no shame in feeling that you are not always at your best. A true warrior feels these things, but strives for better. That way lies glory.

Hey, fuck you Ticketmaster.

When's the next protest, gang?

Job Description Defending press freedom for the next generation

ENGINEERING FRIENDS: This could turn out to be one of the most important jobs for the fate of Democracy. If you're a talented Engineering Manager and personally driven by mission for the betterment of America and the world, we need SecureDrop to remain a world-class product. Good peeps at FPF.

We're falling behind

If you aren’t familiar, Terence Tao is a Fields Medalist and arguably the most prominent and accomplished mathematician of his generation.

No one is safe, basically. The current administration will use any excuse to burn it all to the ground.

My favorite slide from PETS so far

A Fiat–Shamir Transformation From Duplex Sponges We analyze a variant of the Fiat–Shamir transformation based on an ideal permutation. The transformation relies on the popular duplex sponge paradigm, and minimizes the number of calls to the permutat...

We updated our paper on Fiat-Shamir!

We now take a closer look at the gap between what symmetric cryptography has focused on for over 10 years (indifferentiability) and what is actually needed for the soundness of ZKPs and SNARKs (something stronger!).

eprint.iacr.org/2025/536

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: From UNICEF to NPR: Trump’s Cuts End Here: A Town Hall to Defend Global Health and Public Media. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email ab... Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: From UNICEF to NPR: Trump’s Cuts End Here: A Town Hall to Defend Global Health and Public Media. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email ab...

This evening there's an important webinar about the attempts to codify cuts to everything from global health to NPR: us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Relaxing Tea Better Fucking Work

Relaxing Tea Better Fucking Work
theonion.com/relaxin...

Nice

Slides of my talk titled "Lattices give us KEMs and FHE, but where are the efficient lattice PETs? -- By Example of (Verifiable) Oblivious PRFs" given at spiqe-workshop.github.io are here: github.com/malb/talks/b...

Thanks @kennyog.bsky.social and @jurajsomorovsky.bsky.social for inviting me.

Good luck today, Googlers

😭

Announcing The First Recipients of The Zama Cryptanalysis Grants The Zama Cryptanalysis Grant Program supports research that challenges the security of today’s privacy-enhancing tech.

Super pleased to see that Zama has just announced the first recipients of the Zama Cryptanalysis Grants.

www.zama.ai/post/announc...

The projects supported cover security of FHE, MPC, TEEs and ZK.

The teams getting the grants represent some of the leading experts in their respective fields.