Marcel Keller

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.

Cartoon showing a street in the rain. A man on a bike is delivering food, while another courier is delivering packages from Amazon. Two other workers are collecting garbage. Inside one of the houses on the street, we see robots labeled 'AI' sitting dry and warm, engaged in making a paining, playing the violin and writing.

The robot apocalypse hasn't happened yet, but still I can't escape the feeling that something has gone horribly wrong... Cartoon for Dutch newspaper @trouw.nl.

More of my work for Trouw: www.trouw.nl/cartoons/tje...

#ArtificialIntelligence #creativity #work #GenerativeAI

Person: say, i am alive. Computer: I am alive. Person: oh my god.

The number of people arguing, following the #NeurIPS2025 case, that a bit of systematically bad scholarship and borderline academic misconduct is OK because doing things the right way is tedious and time-consuming is concerning.

Yes, doing things well might be boring. But doing them badly is... bad

I’m going to halve my publication output. You should consider slow science, too If we don’t slow down, the research enterprise is going to crash, argues Adrian Barnett.

Advice for Jens Eisert.
doi.org/10.1038/d415...

Petition Restore Fully Free and Open Access to the ACM Digital Library Restore Fully Free and Open Access to the ACM Digital Library

Consider signing this petition regarding restoring free access to the ACM digital library: www.ipetitions.com/petition/res...

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

‘All brakes are off’: Russia’s attempt to rein in illicit market for leaked data backfires Russian state has tolerated parallel probiv market for its convenience but now Ukrainian spies are exploiting it

Privacy issues are unlikely to go away in 2026. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

Release Expected communication cost in compiler · data61/MP-SPDZ Expected communication cost in compiler Semi-honest option of Rep4 Reduced communication for preprocessing in Dealer protocol Option of choosing SoftSpoken parameter at run-time BERT functionality ...

The latest version of MP-SPDZ can predict the communication cost when compiling high-level code. github.com/data61/MP-SP...

Decentralized Key Generation for Zama Mainnet Has Successfully Completed The Decentralized Key Generation (DKG) ceremony for the Zama mainnet has completed successfully.

Fully robust MPC protocol over Galois Rings, executing a TFHE DKG protocol amongst 13 parties, taking 55 hours, with 10.5 Terabytes of data sent per party....

www.zama.org/post/decentr...

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.

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.

If you swap each letter in “bomb” with the next letter in the alphabet, you’ll get “cpnc.” Recently, scientists showed that and other methods can bypass filters on LLMs like Gemini, DeepSeek and Grok. @peterha2l.bsky.social reports: www.quantamagazine.org/cryptographe...

On the internet, age verification doesn't know you're a dog.

"Maybe the name EasyCrypt isn't quite deserved." - @cryptojedi.bsky.social at his Asiacrypt keynote

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!

Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written fully by AI Controversy has erupted after 21% of manuscript reviews for an international AI conference were found to be generated by artificial intelligence.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

📢 Announcing hacklore.org 📢

It’s time to retire outdated cyber advice! More than 80 cybersecurity veterans have signed an open letter urging a shift from folklore to guidance that actually helps people avoid the most common attacks. 🔐

Blog: medium.com/@boblord/let...

Site: www.hacklore.org

At least they make it easy to find out why. It seems they confuse you with Moni Naor on this CiC paper: openalex.org/works/W44092...

One of the motivations for MP-SPDZ was not getting bogged down by this kind of arguments when they are just hypothetical. Every use case has its own trade-offs as the IACR just found out.

Just saw an extended version

Massive Leak Shows Erotic Chatbot Users Turned Women’s Yearbook Pictures Into AI Porn Chatbot roleplay and image generator platform SecretDesires.ai left cloud storage containers of nearly two million of images and videos exposed, including photos and full names of women from social me...

This is a nuts story. An AI chatbot and image platform left millions of images exposed. They show what people are actually using the AI for: taking random women's yearbook, graduation, and social media photos and making super realistic hardcore porn with them
www.404media.co/ai-porn-secr...

DOJ Issued Seizure Warrant to Starlink Over Satellite Internet Systems Used at Scam Compound A new US law enforcement initiative is aimed at crypto fraudsters targeting Americans—and now seeks to seize infrastructure it claims is crucial to notorious scam compounds.

NEW: The US Department of Justice issued a warrant demanding SpaceX seize and disable Starlink devices and accounts being used at a scam compound in Myanmar.

At least 9 Starlink devices were linked to a crypto scam that stole $6 million people, an FBI affidavit says

Story with @lhn.bsky.social

A staggering statistic: "North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year." What are we doing?

Add BERT to ML Library by hiddely · Pull Request #1736 · data61/MP-SPDZ This is an implementation of Huggingface's BERT transformer that I've been meaning to contribute back to MP-SPDZ. I implemented it as part of the evaluation of this work. The implementation...

Thanks to Hidde Lycklama, MP-SPDZ now supports BERT inference. github.com/data61/MP-SP...

Slide is titled: You don't need to use LLMs. Science is a process of collaborative meaning making, by which we try to understand the world Even if AI were perfect, we rely on it at our peril — it is not science if we (i.e., humanity as a whole) do not understand and cannot recapitulate all parts of it I very, very rarely use LLMs myself. You can give yourself permission not to. Don’t FOMO yourself into it

Conclusion: Don't rely on something you don't understand and can't control If you must use LLMS: 1. Treat them like you would an intern: only use them for things you can easily and thoroughly check 2. Make your process as robust as possible 3. Be aware of your own (human) cognitive biases

Getting nervous for the talk I'm about to give at a workshop about "using AI to drive impact" which features slides such as these.

Homes could be $100k cheaper in 10 years with one change to zoning rules, Australian report finds Allowing three-storey townhouses and apartments to be built across all residential land would unlock more than 1m homes in Sydney alone, according to modelling

Why @sydney.yimby.au: www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Remarkable, but important to notice that the change only applies to review/survey and position papers

The AWS Outage Bricked People’s $2,700 Smartbeds When Amazon Web Services went offline, people lost control of their cloud-connected smart beds, getting stuck in reclined positions or roasting with the heat turned all the way up.

The AWS outage bricked people's $2,700 smartbeds, leaving them in a reclining position or with the heat up. People were unable to use them, basically. A GitHub repo exists that lets people operate their beds without reliance on the normal infrastructure

www.404media.co/the-aws-outa...

Our protocol is simple & modular: it works in the "Arithmetic Black Box" model, and inherits the security properties of the ABB instantiation (passive/active, static/adaptive, etc.).

Using SPDℤ₂𝑘 for ABB, we get about 20,000x and 37x better throughput and latency than SoTA for dishonest majority.