The Mathematics of Secrets

For my next book, I’m reading some mid-20th century papers on color vision. These guys will go on for pages about the kind of filters they use, and then their discussion of the test subjects will be “we took the measurements on Mr. Perley G. Nutting, Jr., who sat still for a really long time.”

Love that paper!

At 26, during the Reign of Terror in France, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier narrowly avoided the guillotine. A decade later, he made a discovery that changed mathematics forever.
www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-the-...

Figure 6. The quotientope lattice for n = 4: all quotientopes ordered by inclusion (which corresponds to refinement of the lattice congruences). We only consider lattice congruences whose fan is essential. We have highlighted the cube (green), Loday’s associahedron [Lod04] (blue), another one of Hohlweg–Lange’s associahedra [HL07] (purple), the diagonal rectangulation polytope [LR12] (orange), and the permutahedron (red). Adapted from [PS19, Fig. 9].

This diagram should win some kind of prize for mathematical illustration. From arxiv.org/abs/2305.08471. 🧮

Looks like the Kryptos kerfuffle didn't hurt the auction much! #cryptography www.rrauction.com/auctions/lot...

So, the IACR held an election, but one of the three trustees lost their private key, which prevented them from verifying the results of the election. Forcing them to start over.

The cryptography association was foiled by key management.

hachyderm.io/@leak/110784...

picture of text. For this election and in accordance with the bylaws of the ACR, the three members of the ACR 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. Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share. As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election.

This IACR election news is so relatable

Did you know?
Keccak is everywhere, quietly protecting real systems, such as:
• Connected devices checking data integrity
• Firmware updates verifying authenticity
• Embedded products securing messages
• PQC standards like ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA
⬇

“Key Management” is the cryptographic community’s version of “…it’s always DNS” International Association for Cryptologic Research runs secure vote and then loses the keys so nobody knows what the result is. As one commenter put it: “So a single member can collude to res…

“Key Management” is the cryptographic community’s version of “…it’s always DNS”
https://alecmuffett.com/article/126061
#cryptography #iacr

Post-Quantum Cryptography in .NET - .NET Blog What we've added for PQC, and how we got there.

Post-Quantum Cryptography in .NET

ift.tt/osS9nPf

#dotnet #pqc #cryptography #programming #csharp

This December, the Faculty of Engineering at #USyd is delighted to welcome Dr Moti Yung, who will speak at the Basser seminar series in our School. He will tell us about "Malicious Cryptography: beyond adhering to specifications in secure systems"

🕒 Tuesday, Dec 2
3:30—4:30pm

Physicists Take the Imaginary Numbers Out of Quantum Mechanics | Quanta Magazine Quantum mechanics has at last been formulated exclusively with real numbers, bringing a mathematical puzzle at the heart of the theory into a new era of inquiry.

Hot take: I hate to say it, but this is silly. Mathematicians have known for at least a century that you can replace imaginary numbers with 2x2 matrices of real numbers. Would the result be useful? Sounds like the answer is no. #quantumcomputing www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-t...

Well, that's a #cryptography oops. web.archive.org/web/20251016...

Doing some profile editing --- this should really be a pinned post, not my bio!

In his book The Mathematics of Secrets, Joshua Holden takes readers on a tour of the mathematics behind cryptography—the science of sending secret messages.

mathofsecrets.com

Found this in my old tabs. Kind of a scary idea! #Cryptography can't do much about attacks like this. @schneier.com www.schneier.com/blog/archive...

Proof

An incredible proof from “When Least is Best” by Paul Nahin

The Mathematical Radio: Inside the Magic of AM, FM, and Single-Sideband by Paul J. Nahin

How a modern radio works, told through mathematics, history, and selected puzzles.

Paul J. Nahin's The Mathematical Radio is now available in #paperback. Learn more: press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

#Math #Mathematics #History

Everything involving generating functions seems like a great magic trick to me! :)

Slight clickbaiting here --- #quantumcomputing with 300 *logical* qubits can do amazing things, but this machine only has 3000 *physical* qubits. Still potentially a big step forward! @apsphysics.bsky.social
phys.org/news/2025-09...

Platforms Have Failed Us on Abortion Content. Here's How They Can Fix BY MOLLY BUCKLEY | October 1, 2025This is the eighth installment in a blog series documenting EFF's findings from the Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. You can read additional posts here. In our Stop

At a time when abortion rights are under attack, platforms with enormous resources—like Meta—have no excuse for silencing this important speech. We must push platforms to #StopCensoringAbortion. www.eff.org/pages/platf...

The Xiaofeng Wang search warrant has been unsealed, thanks to @riana.bsky.social. infosec.exchange/@hovav/11531...

I covered this in almost 3 hours of yammering last night:

youtube.com/live/fwVLsOe...

New Math Revives Geometry’s Oldest Problems | Quanta Magazine Using a relatively young theory, a team of mathematicians has started to answer questions whose roots lie at the very beginning of mathematics.

Oh, right, I said I'd post some good news. This article appears to have nothing to do with #cryptography, but down towards the bottom they talk about "clock arithmetic" --- that's the "wraparound" I introduce on page 3 of my book! @quantamagazine.bsky.social www.quantamagazine.org/new-math-rev...

Kerberoasting I learn about cryptographic vulnerabilities all the time, and they generally fill me with some combination of jealousy (“oh, why didn’t I think of that”) or else they impress me w…

Come on Microsoft #cryptography, get with the 21st century! @matthewdgreen.bsky.social blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2025/09/10/k...

I’m flagging this nice book/paper on FHE schemes not necessarily because it’s correct and I endorse it, but because it looks pretty useful. arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05136

Wavefunction Collapse

Don't be panel #2. xkcd.com/3134/ #quantumcomputing

A picture of a convex polyhedron with a large number of triangular faces and a flat top in the form of a regular n-gon for some largish n, captioned ‘Figure 2: The Noperthedron’

Via @david, new shape just dropped.

The authors claim to have proved that this polyhedron lacks Rupert's property. I haven't read the proof yet, but the claim itself doesn't seem outrageous.

Close up of side of turquoise noperthedron on a table. The shape is turquoise with triangulation where the band around it Center has smaller triangles and the top and bottom have longer triangles creating a belt around it that is more bulbus.

A turquoise 3d printed bulbous triangulated vase on a table with some rocks and weaving.

A noperthedron container printed!

#mathart #mtbos #noperthedron #polyhedra

A teal noperthedron with a cylindrical hole in a drafting program with shadowing. The shape is vase-like with triangulated faces, but bulbous at the center and slanted inward at the top in bottom so that there is a band of 3 layers of shorter triangles in the middle and longer more angled-in triangles at the top and base of the vase (container).

I am printing a noperthedron pencil holder :)

#mtbos #mathart #noperthedron