“Enjoy the small things.” Good reminder.

🔥🔥🔥 Get ready for #ZKProof 2026! Speaker: Hossein Hafezi @RandomString00 from @nyuniversity Join us in Rome, May 9-10 to discuss the latest in ZKPs and applications, the Quantum threat, formal verification in ArkLib, IOPs & more. For more details - link in the first comment

Announcing the preliminary program for Cedarcrypt — our inaugural applied cryptography summer school and conference, July 13–16, 2026 at the American University of Beirut - Mediterraneo in Paphos, Cyprus! We've put together a program we're genuinely proud of — a pedagogical progression from accessible foundations to state-of-the-art constructions, featuring lectures, hands-on workshops, and research talks from leading voices across academia and industry. The program spans everything from accessible foundations to cutting-edge research: Bart Preneel (KU Leuven) opens with a keynote, followed by deep dives into FHE with Emad Heydari Beni (Nokia Bell Labs), state-of-the-art hash-based SNARKs with Giacomo Fenzi (EPFL), and Zero-Knowledge Proofs with Tarek Galal (TU Berlin). Practitioners will hear from Zeke Hunter-Green how The Guardian built their anonymous whistleblowing system (CoverDrop MLS), and a host of other guest speakers who will help attendees learn post-quantum migration strategies across lattices, isogenies, and codes, and get hands-on with threshold signing, MPC engineering, and constant-time programming — all in four days on the Mediterranean coast. Organized in collaboration with the IACR, and hosted on Cyprus's Mediterranean coast — a UNESCO World Heritage city where you can step from a workshop on threshold signing straight to a seaside taverna. Thanks to our generous sponsors — Electi, PQShield, Symbolic Software, Zama, and several anonymous donors — we're offering FULL SCHOLARSHIPS (travel lodging) to students and early-career researchers, awarded on a rolling basis until funds are exhausted. Graduate students, early-career researchers, and practitioners in applied cryptography: we built this for you! Join us this July in sunny Paphos! Let's make this an inaugural event to remember!

As a recent PC chair, I can confirm that this will be a real problem in a few months.

Kinda reflects the state of the job market everywhere:

Hi everyone! 👋 We're running a brief anonymous survey on how cryptographers and security researchers view the potential quantum threat, for a research project. We'd really appreciate your input! forms.gle/6wDL65dRPb5JSuwg6 Thanks so much! 🙏

This new paper looks very cool. I was never a fan of delegation schemes requiring you to secret share the witness between servers. Here there is a nice idea of how to privatey delegate an MSM to one server using the learning parity with noise assumption. eprint.iacr.org/2025/2113.pd…

Claim: gpt-5-pro can prove new interesting mathematics. Proof: I took a convex optimization paper with a clean open problem in it and asked gpt-5-pro to work on it. It proved a better bound than what is in the paper, and I checked the proof it's correct. Details below.

We are recruiting.

Learn about KZH-fold: a new accumulation/folding scheme! 2000x reduction in communication and 50x faster decider time compared to Nova for 2000 Poseidon hashes, at a cost of 3x the prover time. Hossein Hafezi presented this standout collab from the Ethereum Foundation & NYU! youtube.com/watch?v=vnz05W3t…

Recently, I presented our recent work, "KZH-Fold: Accountable Voting from Sublinear Accumulation" (joint work with @benediktbuenz @arantxazapico and @asn_d6) at Stanford Security Seminar, you may find the video here: crypto.stanford.edu/seclab/s…

Accumulation/Folding schemes are all the hype. However, all current schemes have proofs that are linear in the circuit size (think megabytes). That might be ok if you are locally proving (IVC) but doesn't scale for distributed proving (PCD). Cue KZH-fold: eprint.iacr.org/2025/144