Sabine Oechsner

Cryptography Engineering Has An Intrinsic Duty of Care To understand my point, I need to first explain three different cryptography attack papers / blog posts. I promise this won't be boring. Three Little Dislcosures Misuse-Prone Ciphers For All In a blog post titled Carelessness versus craftsmanship in cryptography, cryptography analyst and Queer in Cryptography emcee Opal Wright delves into the misuse-prone and side-channel-riddled JavaScript and Python implementations of the AES block cipher.

Cryptography engineering has an intrinsic duty of care.

If you have an IND-CCA2 scheme but you only want IND-CPA you can use the FAFO transform

How far back in time can you understand English? An experiment in language change

If you liked this experiment, I published a full piece today in the same vein: a text that gets 100 years older with every section, from a modern blog post to a medieval chronicle.

It's a single story spanning 1000 years of English. See how far you get.

www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...

📢 We have extended the deadline for our EC workshop to *Monday AoE*!

Submit your talk proposal on any topic related to cryptographic proofs and proof techniques 🤓

Take the opportunity to advertise your ongoing, submitted or published work, or to share other insights related to security proofs

Remember to submit your ProTeCS talk. The deadline is on Thursday!

When Zero-Knowledge Proofs Are Not Enough: Lessons from a Real-World Zero-Knowledge Authorization System, a.k.a Analysis and Vulnerabilities in zkLogin (eprint.iacr.org/2026/227) (1/n)

(It's because back in the days, when your train had to stop all the time, you wanted a special type of train that could accelerate faster than a regular train... and then the name stuck.

YouTube video by Trains Are Awesome Why are these slow trains called Sprinter?

TIL there is an actual historic reason for why the Dutch gave their slow local trains the very intuitive name "sprinter"

m.youtube.com/watch?v=gTjy...

German place-names rendered into English (morphologically reconstructed from historical forms)

Call for submissions: #TPMPC2026 (Theory & Practice of MPC)

Submit your latest and coolest results by March 2, 2026.

Aarhus, Denmark, May 18–22, 2026.

Monday: MPC security in practice.

Friday: Symposium celebrating Ivan Damgård’s work.

Links in comments.

I am co-organising (with @drl3c7er.bsky.social and Lucjan Hanzlik) a workshop on Privacy-Enhancing Cryptography in Rome on May 10 as an affiliated event to IACR Eurocrypt. Submit your best PEC-work (3-page extended abstract) for presentation by February 25th: privcryptworkshop.github.io

RWC 2026 registration Real World Crypto Symposium

Last chance: the early registration deadline is tomorrow, February 6 (AoE).
rwc.iacr.org/2026/registr...

The IACR board sent a survey to members last year, and it took us a while to analyze the results and publish findings. You can see them at iacr.org/surveyresults/

What are you, a programmer?

Planning your trip to Eurocrypt or looking for an excuse to still go? The reviewers did not appreciate your too involved or too elegant proofs?

Consider submitting a talk to ProTeCS (protecs-workshop.gitlab.io), an affiliated event of EC, where we celebrate proofs as independent objects of study!

Now's your chance to participate in growing academic cryptography participation in the Middle East and North Africa region: the Africacrypt call for papers is out!

Submit your paper and come join us this July in beautiful Hammamet, Tunisia: www.africacrypt2026.tn/call-for-pap...

What package did you use for the code?

Bit of a last-minute announcement: school on isogenies 9 - 13 Feb at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST)
groups.oist.jp/tsvp/event/s...
Registration deadline is tomorrow (15 Jan).

We're hosting an Autumn School in London, UK, from 15 to 17 September 2026, to bring together ethnographers and cryptographers to discuss ways in which the two fields can be meaningfully brought into conversation. This is also the premise of our Social Foundations of Cryptography project: to ground cryptography in ethnography. Here, we rely on ethnographic methods, rather than our intuition, to surface security notions that we then formalise and sometimes realise using cryptography. Our intention is to 'flip' the typical relationship between the computer and social sciences, where the latter has traditionally ended up in a service role to the former. Rather, we want to put cryptography at the mercy of ethnography. But how do we do this? How do we as cryptographers interact with and make sense of ethnographic field data? How can we refine, improve or extend this interaction? What obstacles do we face when we make cryptography rely on ethnographic data which is inherently 'messy'? How do we handle that cryptographic notions tend to require some form of generalisation but ethnographic findings can only be particular? How do ethnographers retain the richness of ethnographic field data in conversations with cryptographic work? Indeed, our project has already highlighted some limitations of our approach. It has brought to the fore concrete challenges in 'letting the ethnographic data speak' while still making it speak to cryptography. The Autumn School is an opportunity to explore these questions jointly across ethnography and cryptography, through a series of talks, group discussions and activities. We say a bit more about the programme and registration for the Autumn School here.

Social Foundations of Cryptography: Autumn School
London, UK | 15 to 17 September 2026
social-foundations-of-cryptography.gitlab.io/school

DDR 0,4 0/-1 1/W

So a question for people working on subways? Construction? My daughter wants to know what these scribbles on the wall of the subway tunnel shortly before Essen Main Station, approaching from the south might mean.

I Tried to Be the Government. It Did Not Go Well. My five-month quest to monitor the weather, track inflation, and inspect milk for harmful microorganisms

if you want a long read that involves udders, a hot air balloon, and some extremely dubious data on egg prices, the story I’ve been working on for the last few months where I tried to single-handedly take on every government function myself is now online! www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

RWC 2026 program Real World Crypto Symposium

The Real World Crypto 2026 program is now online: rwc.iacr.org/2026/program...

We look forward to seeing many of you!

[PLDI 26] SRC Program Committee Nomination Form Thank you for your interest in the program committee for the SRC! We're excited for you (or someone you are nominating) to join us in providing high-quality feedback to junior researchers in the PLDI ...

Are you interested in programming languages research and mentoring up and coming PL researchers?

Then you should fill out the self-nomination form for the PLDI'26 Student Research Competition's PC: forms.gle/KSacbLEtw1Yw...
(Note, you must have a PhD by June 2026 to be a judge)

He's a 10 but only in bits of security

Lecturer (≅ Assistant Professor/Juniorprofessor/Maître de conférences) in Cryptography at King’s College London 2026 We are looking to recruit a lecturer in cryptography at King’s College London to work with us within the cybersecurity group: I think it’s fair to say we got strong expertise in lattice-based and p…

Come work with us!

Lecturer (≅ Assistant Professor/Juniorprofessor/Maître de conférences) in Cryptography at King’s College London

martinralbrecht.wordpress.com/2026/01/05/l...

For those of you keeping score at home, I’ve been informed by Alessandra that it’s a classic spaghetti with oil and cheese!

Because this account right here really gets to the bottom of the important topics.

Folks, she brought a whole plate of spaghetti to the broadcast center to do her headshot. She then houses that spaghetti.

Mattia sips on an espresso during his.

Truly the heroes we need during these times.

Deadline is January 7. Still a few days left to apply...

cryptographers are people too, they lose their keys and everything

Advice I now give to grad students and postdocs in the sciences: Don’t just try to meet and impress senior scientists. They’ll retire soon. Get to know your fellow students - make friends where possible, be colleagues at least. These are the people you’ll be sharing the field with for decades.