NIST finalized IR 8547 on October 27, 2026, deprecating all quantum-vulnerable digital signatures (RSA, ECDSA, EdDSA) across all security strengths after 2030 and disallowing them after 2035. At the same time, the finalized report confirms that the FIPS standard derived from FALCON (FN-DSA) is still under development, leaving ML-DSA (FIPS 204) and SLH-DSA (FIPS 205) as the only finalized general-purpose post-quantum signature standards.

For decentralized consensus and peer-to-peer networks where every node independently verifies thousands of signatures per block without centralized PKI, that narrows the practical design space significantly:

First, SLH-DSA (FIPS 205) offers conservative hash-based assumptions, but its verification latency and multi-kilobyte signature sizes make it painful for high-throughput gossip and transaction mempools unless paired with heavy recursive SNARK aggregation.

Second, FN-DSA (Falcon) has the smallest bandwidth footprint at roughly 666 bytes for Level 1, which is why blockchain researchers love it on paper, but beyond the FIPS standard still not being finalized, constant-time floating-point signing on heterogeneous consumer hardware and mobile devices remains notoriously tricky to implement safely without side-channel leaks.

Third, ML-DSA-65 (FIPS 204) sits right in the middle: deterministic integer arithmetic, fast verification times on both desktop and mobile CPUs, and a finalized NIST standard, at the cost of a 1,952-byte public key and a 3,309-byte signature.

For cryptographers and protocol engineers working on decentralized systems today, are you standardizing on ML-DSA-65 as the default workhorse despite the 3.3 KB bandwidth hit, or are you holding out for FN-DSA or hash-based SNARK aggregation?

Hey everyone,

I’m currently trying to get my hands on a copy of "Toward Finding S-Box Circuits With Optimal Multiplicative Complexity" (by Yongjin Jeon, Seungjun Baek, and Jongsung Kim, published in IEEE Transactions on Computers, 2024).

I don't have institutional access, and IEEE thinks I should pay for that.

If anyone with university credentials or an IEEE Xplore subscription can help me out, I'd be very grateful.

if i have secure implementation of algorithm in 1 language and i wana port it to other language and they dont have compiler is there secure way to do it?

So basically to sign a file you take the hash of the file and encrypt it with a private key and you decrypt the hash using public key, what I fear we could do is do a known-plaintext attack on the private key because you know the plaintext and ENCRYPTED version of the file hash using private key, and reverse the private key using the known-plaintext attack, that's what I fear could happen.

im thinking is this posible to make low entrophy password secure by adding more time to check if its right like for example u need to hash with argon2 with allot of cycles but password has small amount of enrophy will it be secure since attacker cant check all passwords fast

I am in my final year of btech (graduating in 2027).

I've built a sumcheck cpu and gpu (ICICLE) based prover and verifier, a low level OCI compliant container runtime (contributed to most of the features), and building an adaptive proving runtime on edge as a research project, including groth n stark (wip).

I always intend to go the deepest layer possible, now can derive the complete math equations of groth n stark so far, training myself to be comfortable with the math.

My interests are in applied cryptography, zkps, systems engineering.

Almost everyone wants to hire devs with experience, am not able to land a job.

As the graduation date is getting closer, I am losing confidence day by day, my mind calling it out and thinking to get a swe role.

How do I get a job in cryptography with a btech.

I really need you advice, if your company hires grad with some knowledge and willing to put in efforts please let me know. Thanks guys.

Like I get that the public key can't be reversed to show a private key and the mathematical relation between private and public keys but like how does it work in detail? How are the keys generated? How is the public key generated from the private key and why almost can't we reverse it?

I've been putting together an interactive visual guide on Galois Fields for AES, and the hardest part to explain cleanly is the transition from abstract polynomial arithmetic over GF(2) to the actual byte-level xtime (0x11b -> 0x1b) shift-and-XOR implementation.

Most resources either gloss over why 0x11b is irreducible or dump ring axioms before showing how MixColumns and the S-Box actually use the field structure.

For those who teach or implement cryptography: what mental model clicked best for you when connecting polynomial reduction to byte-level AES round operations?

I just wanted to let you all know that COSIC published a series of recorded lectures by Tim Beyne and Vincent Rijmen based on their book on linear cryptanalysis:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb8djaPEg5m4&si=YjtaH6kIoCsVKQ-x

Definitely worth checking if you enjoy symmetric cryptography cryptanalysis.

I am sketching a design for a federation of small, independent append-only logs, one per community, where each log's signed tree head is cosigned by neighbouring logs whenever someone physically travels between them. Links between the communities are intermittent, and some are down for weeks. The records are access receipts and contain no personal data, which stays encrypted off the log under a key only its subject holds.

My worry is split views. If a log operator shows one tree to the neighbour on the left and a different one to the neighbour on the right, how long can that survive when cosigning happens in occasional bursts rather than continuously? I understand how gossip among auditors handles this in the CT ecosystem, but I do not know how the guarantees degrade when the gossip is hand-carried and the gaps are days or weeks. Is there a standard way to bound the window in which a lie could go unnoticed, and what would you put in each checkpoint to make comparison cheap for a courier carrying very little?

A second problem is key loss. If the data subject dies or loses their key, the file becomes unreadable and, in my design, nobody can be notified of accesses to it. Social recovery with threshold shares seems the obvious answer, but it also gives a handful of shard holders a quiet power over the dead. Does anyone have experience with recovery schemes where the shard holders themselves must be public and logged, and what goes wrong in practice?

I am doing this for a fictional world I am building at r/TheGreatFederation, but I want the cryptography to be honest, so please be as unkind to the design as it deserves.

I'm doing a statistical audit of the public draw history of an electronic roulette lottery game (Ruleta Express, Dominican Republic). Looking for advice on randomness-quality tests and how to interpret structured biases — not gambling advice, and I'm not asking anyone to bet.

Game shape (public): • 19 pockets, numbers 0–18. Draw about every 5 minutes. Pays 18×. • Historic operator was Intralot/LOTOS until ~2020; current RNG implementation is not public.

Observed patterns in the history: • Daytime window (~07:38–19:59): very strong anti-repetition — a number almost never repeats the previous draw (~0%). • Late night: repeats around ~5% (closer to uniform independent draws). • "0" appears roughly ~10% less often than a fair 1/19 would predict, across the day.

What I already checked (no credible match): • Classic daily-seeded 32-bit PRNGs against the series: MSVC/ANSI rand, glibc rand(), Java LCG, .NET Framework LCG, MT19937.

Questions for people who audit RNG / randomness quality:

1. Does a daytime anti-repetition rule layered on top of an otherwise uniform generator fit this better than a single biased generator? How would you separate those hypotheses statistically?

2. Sensible next randomness tests on a categorical 0–18 series: PractRand / TestU01 (after a suitable encoding), chi-square / runs / autocorrelation, spectral / period checks, or something else cheap?

3. For lottery-style electronic draws, are scheduled rule layers (different daytime vs night behavior) common in certified systems, or more often a symptom of a non-certified path?

4. Any references on auditing short discrete alphabets (19 symbols) rather than bitstreams?

Happy to share anonymized summary stats. Again: analysis / audit only — please don't bet on this.

I don't give a f if it says it can.

Is mine a technically stupid question, I don't know!

is there any cryptographic algorithms(preferably post quantum) where theres these functions

gena(seed)->ask,apk
genu(seed)->usk,upk
asign(ask,upk)->asgn
usign(usk,data,asgn)->usgn
verify(usgn,data,apk)->valid
check(usgn,usgn,data)->bool

and no one(at least before heat death of universe) can get upk/usk from usgn and ask from apk

and verify checks if upk used to make usgn is signed by selected authority and is signing that specific data

and check checks if 2 usgn are made by same upk but only works for same data,if 2 usgns are from diferend data it wont work

I've been thinking about use cases that my friends and I could do with RSA encryption or one-time pads because I haven't really found anything unless you're super worried about people like Apple or Google snooping or sending illegal or illicit data or information. I've really just been doing fun tests or, "Hey, use my public key, bro!" Any insight would be nice for fun things to do with encryption besides the obvious.

Hey everyone!

I'm interested in learning cryptography, but I'm still a complete beginner in this field.

I'd like to build a solid foundation and gradually move on to more advanced concepts.

What books would you recommend for someone starting from scratch?

I'm particularly interested in understanding the fundamentals, including encryption, decryption, symmetric and asymmetric cryptography, hashing, and public-key cryptography.

Also, would you recommend learning some mathematics or programming (Python) before diving into cryptography?

I'd appreciate any book recommendations, learning resources, or personal experiences.

Thanks in advance!

Because we know that most encryptions are done using AES, and we also know that AES is far far farr from ever being broken or brute-forced, no matter how much technology advances

Good day everyone, and thank you for your time.

I would like to keep this simple - I am from India and currently in my mid 30s working a dead end procurement job, I am aspiring for a career switch especially to a profile that is mathematically rigorous and interesting. Cryptography kind of fits that bill from the limited exposure that I have received.

However, it will be much better if I'll get insights from folks who are in the field and have got their hands dirty in the real world. Please go ahead and guide me if I can get my foot in by working on side-projects or am I being delusional here?

Your honest feedback will be appreciated!

Ran into this one while wiring up SRP-6a between an iOS app (swift-srp 2.4.0) and a Node server (tssrp6a), and figured I'd share it in case it saves someone a few hours.

I ran the same fixed inputs through both libraries and compared everything. x, A, u, S and the proofs all matched byte for byte, except when the salt started with a 0x00 byte. Then x came out completely different and every login failed, even with the right password.

What's going on: tssrp6a pushes the salt through a JS bigint, and bigint.toString(16) never keeps leading zeros, so the 0x00 just disappears inside computeX. swift-srp hashes the literal bytes it's given. Both are doing what they're built to do, they just don't agree on that one detail.

It only hits about 1 in 256 random salts, so in the real world it would show up as a rare login failure that you can't reproduce on demand. That's the part that would've driven me nuts.

My fix was to strip the leading zero bytes from the salt on the Swift side before any SRP math. I also added a test with a fixed salt that starts with 0x00 so it can't sneak back in.

Happy to share the test vectors if anyone wants them. Has anyone else run into this with other SRP library pairs?

My idea is, you have a 5th degree polynomial as shared secret. To encrypt data, Alice encodes a part of it as a number, turns it into a root in the form (x - root) and multiplies the root with the secret polynomial. She does that 4 times. Alice then sends the final polynomial of degree 9 to Bob. Bob then divides the polynomial Alice send him by the shared secret. He gets a 4th degree poylnomial and uses rhe quartic formula to find the roots, by that retrieving the data Alice send him. If Eve intercepts the message, she only has a 9th degree polynomial, for which the roots cant be calculated.

I am very new to the field of cryptography, so I am fairly certain I missed some things. I would really appreciate the opinion of you. Thanks

Attempting to write a book and i want to engage the reader with codes and stuff so it feels more interesting and interactive. I would rather ask the people interested in this stuff then google. I also do watch ARGs so I'm not a fake fan or Larper or whatever .

I'm currently self-studying cryptography in my free time, and I've noticed that I spend probably half of that time stuck in an analysis paralysis loop.

I keep researching resources, comparing textbooks, looking for roadmaps, and trying to figure out the most efficient way to approach the subject. Ironically, I end up spending more time figuring out how to learn cryptography than actually learning it.

And when I finally sit down to study, I often struggle with motivation.

I think part of the problem is that I don't have a concrete goal. I'm genuinely interested in cryptography, especially the mathematics and the reasoning behind cryptographic algorithms, but I don't have any external motivation pushing me forward. No exams, no deadlines, no specific problem I'm trying to solve.

I also find myself constantly questioning whether I'm learning the right things, in the right order, or going too deep into topics that might not even be relevant to what I eventually want to do.

I feel like I'm trying to design the perfect learning path before allowing myself to actually follow one.

For those of you who have self-studied cryptography:

• How did you structure your learning without getting overwhelmed by the amount of material?

• Did you have a specific end goal or project that kept you motivated?

• How did you balance learning the underlying mathematics and theory with actually implementing things?

I'm especially interested in hearing from people who went through something similar and managed to get past it.