Nigel Smart

A custom meme edited from XKCD #2501 "Average Familiarity". [Ponytail and Cueball are talking. Ponytail has her hand raised, palm up, towards Cueball.] Ponytail: Zero-knowledge is second nature to us cryptographers, so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows low-degree extensions and proximity testing. Cueball: And Reed-Solomon, of course. Ponytail: Of course. [Caption below the panel] Even when they're trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person's familiarity with their field.

Oh I like this!

#xckd #xkcd2501 #meme #cryptography #nerd #zkp #zeroknowledge

There's a lot of concern of Europeans being dependent on US payment firms, notably Visa/Mastercard.

We forget that until 2016 Europe DID have its own payments champion. Visa Europe was owned by European banks (it merely licensed the Visa name)

Sold for ~$20bn. Basically zero regulatory scrutiny.

Britain is in denial on defence Politicians have not prepared the public for a dangerous new era

Labour isn’t levelling with voters on the sacrifices higher defence spending will require, storing up trouble for the future. www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...

The UK was declared measles free in 2017.

Vaccine programs completely eliminated it.

Since then, pro sickness conspiracy theorists and anti science idiots have enabled its return.

Do you use a cloud-based password manager? So what's your threat model?

Vendors like Bitwarden, Dashlane, LastPass and 1Password offer you "Zero Knowledge Encryption", with statements like: "Not even the team at Bitwarden can read your data (even
if we wanted to)."

We decided to test this… 1/n

"This is vibes-based policy making, not evidence-based policy making" — me talking on BBC Radio Scotland Breakfast just now about the MPs pushing for a social media ban for under 16s.

CFP says:
"Original research papers on all aspects of public-key cryptography, covering theory, implementations and applications, and related fields, are solicited for submission to PKC 2026"

Reviewer B says:
"I do not think it aligns well with the theoretical focus expected at this conference"

FHE.org would like to thank @leastauthority.bsky.social for their continued sponsorship this year (and last!) of the FHE.org 2026 conference.

#FHE #HomomorphicEncryption #FHE2026 #LeastAuthority

bloody Normans, coming over here and holding the battle of Hastings not even in Hastings but in Battle.

Today I was looking at an article on Multi-Party Threshold #Cryptography and wondered why "threshold" has only one h. Turns out the etymology is not "thresh-hold" at all, but "thresh-wold", possibly from the Middle English word "wold" meaning "forest". Mind blown.

RWC 2026 registration Real World Crypto Symposium

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

Matt goes onto say.... "I tend to fall into the latter group"

Like Matt, I also fall into this group

"The Internet has mostly divided itself into people who already know these allegations are true, because they don’t trust Meta and of course Meta can read your messages — and a second set of people who also don’t trust Meta but mostly think this is unsupported nonsense"

Well said Matt.

Cedarcrypt 2026 - Applied Cryptography Summer School & Conference Join us for four days of applied cryptography in the Mediterranean. July 13-16, 2026 at AUB Mediterraneo Campus, Paphos, Cyprus.

Come be part of Cedarcrypt, our historic new initiative to grow cryptography research, development and representation in the Levant region!

We're seeking speakers and workshop leaders: our call for submissions is open! Learn more: cedarcrypt.org

Please spread the word!

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/

Looking forward to this...

www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/events...

The Zama Public Auction: $118M Committed for the First Encrypted ICO on Ethereum This has been years in the making. A few weeks ago, Zama announced its launch on mainnet with the first Confidential USDT (cUSDT) transfer on Ethereum.

It has been an exciting past week for Zama.

Now the results are in. The first sealed bid auction conducted using Fully Homomorphic Encryption, and it all went smoothly.

Fully Homomorphic Encryption is now here and ready to use.

www.linkedin.com/pulse/zama-p...

Reminder that the next submission deadline for IACR's Communications in Cryptology is next Monday.

Remember this is a fully reviewed Diamond Open Access (free for authors, free for readers) journal , published by the premier cryptographic society on earth.

cic.iacr.org

Belgian city named among best places to visit in Europe in 2026 "Gothic spires meet solar panels, street art meets university cloisters, and cafes hum with conversation in half a dozen languages."

Leuven named among best places to visit in Europe in 2026

www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/1931...

The ticker is $ZAMA Everything that goes onchain will eventually be encrypted, and it starts today with the Zama Public Auction.

The ticker is $ZAMA

www.zama.org/post/the-tic...

Looking forward to the NIST workshop on Multi-Party Threshold Schemes next week. It has been a long time since the project was first conceived by NIST, but now excited it is really all systems go.

csrc.nist.gov/events/2026/...

My talk will be on Tuesday

FHE.org would like to thank Brightside for their sponsorship this year (and last!) of the FHE.org 2026 conference.

Sponsorships like Brightside's make it possible to provide a quality conference with great speakers and free student admission.

#FHE #HomomorphicEncryption #FHE2026 #brightside

It’s a tremendous honour, really tremendous - to be presented with a ‘World No.1 University’ ranking from Oxford. Very smart people. The best. Everyone knows it. Nobody thought it could happen, but here we are. Absolutely incredible.

YouTube video by COSIC - Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography One Tap To Hijack Them All - A Security Analysis of the Google Fast Pair Protocol

Nice attack from COSIC on headphones...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j45...

Details here...

whisperpair.eu

Ghent cyber firm Aikido becomes Belgian tech unicorn after $60m funding round Ghent-based cybersecurity company Aikido Security has raised more than 60 million dollars in new funding, pushing its valuation above one billion...

Belgium has a cyber security unicorn....

www.belganewsagency.eu/ghent-cyber-...

New resource added to FHE.org /resources :

"AAAI 2024 Tutorial: Fully Homomorphic Encryption for Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning using the OpenFHE Library" by Ian Quah, Yuriy Polyakov, and Sukanya Mandal.

fhe.org/resources/#0...

#FHE #Homomorphicencryption #OpenFHE

Craig Gentry gave a talk at last years FHE.org, so it is only appropriate that Shai is giving a talk at this years FHE.org. Between them Gentry and Halevi wrote the early playbook on Homomorphic Encryption

There are now at least 365 UK MPs with accounts on Bluesky – more than half (56%) of all MPs

🔴 This includes nearly 70% of Labour MPs
🔶 Nearly 90% of Lib Dem MPs
🟢 All the 4 Green MPs

🔵 But only 5% of Conservative MPs
➡️ No Reform MPs

Best way to start RWC week in Taipei is to go to FHE.org....

RWC 2026 registration Real World Crypto Symposium

Registration for Real World Crypto 2026 is now open! rwc.iacr.org/2026/registr...