Sabine Oechsner

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.

RWC 2026 accepted papers Real World Crypto Symposium

@rwc.iacr.org accepted talks are out....

rwc.iacr.org/2026/accepte...

I am not sure how they are going to fit them all into three days

Your quarterly reminder to submit a paper to Communications in Cryptology...

cic.iacr.org

It is Diamond Open Access (readers and authors do not pay) and it contains all your new cool cryptographic research.

Next deadline for submission is Feb 2nd.

Come work with Peter Scholl @schollster.bsky.social and me in Aarhus!

Cryptographers Show That AI Protections Will Always Have Holes | Quanta Magazine Large language models such as ChatGPT come with filters to keep certain info from getting out. A new mathematical argument shows that systems like this can never be completely safe.

Cryptography shows that AI filters will never work....

www.quantamagazine.org/cryptographe...

Nice application of crypto to AI, and shows that AI has inherent limitations.

Of course it does, it's a Maglite!

Interested in the security of MPC implementations?

Peter Scholl (@schollster.bsky.social) and I are looking for research interns to study the theory/practice gap for MPC. We can host multiple interns in Aarhus for the summer 2026.

More information: mpcinthewild.github.io

Help us spread the word!

First time?

That was in the good old days when you could always open the doors on both sides of the train. I believe you need serious commitment these days to pull that off.

You are laughing, but my class managed to do that on a school trip once 🥲

I had almost forgotten about Time AI