Protocol studies, the next crypto cycle, and the next age of the world
The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols | Summer of Protocols
DRAFT Version 0.99, March 6th, 2023
Strangeness, illegibility, hardness
An update from our Protocol Fiction special interest group
Metastablecoin Fragmentation (updated)
A fundamental problem for decentralized systems like permissionless blockchains is that their security depends upon the cost of an attack be...
attested.network — Proof of Payment for ATProtocol
An open specification for decentralized, cryptographically verifiable proof of payments.
Crypto 101
Crypto 101 is an introductory course on cryptography, freely available for programmers of all ages and skill levels.
The Matrix Holiday Update 2022
Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications
BeeKEM: Decentralized, Secure and Efficient Group Key Agreement
Group key agreement protocols are essential for modern secure messaging. Most existing group key agreement protocols assume a centralized model with a semi-trusted service that mediates the communication. This is efficient, but problematic for some important applications, since a central service can be a choke point for surveillance and censorship. There is a nascent literature on decentralized group key agreement that avoids such reliance, but existing proposals either do not scale, with update costs linear or quadratic in the group size, or lack proofs of security. Centralized protocols can offer much lower (logarithmic) cost. We present BeeKEM, the first decentralized group key agreement protocol with logarithmic update cost in the common case (degrading to linear in the worst case) and proofs of security. We provide an open-source implementation and demonstrate that it is competitive with OpenMLS. BeeKEM opens the door for a range of communication and collaboration applications offering not only end-to-end encryption, but also metadata privacy and censorship resistance.
Tutorial: Introduction to Formal Verification with Lean (Part 1) - HashCloak
A tutorial Formal Verification using Lean for cryptographic engineers. Implement and prove correctness of the One-Time pad following a cryptography book.
Issue 104 – World Tyranny Financial
As the Trump family’s crypto dealings raise more alarms, crypto enforcement is falling to new lows
Privy Blog | Privy and Stripe: Bringing crypto to everyone
We started Privy a little over three years ago to make it easy for any developer to build better products on crypto rails. Whether crypto is core to your app or simply a new layer of functionality, a good crypto product should just feel like a good product, period. By making crypto usable, we help make it useful for everyone.
Encrypted Spaces — Research preview
An architecture for collaborative applications where data is encrypted and operations are cryptographically verifiable.
Trust Revolution
Unfiltered conversations with builders, thinkers, and operators in Bitcoin and beyond. Exploring systems we trust, why they work (or don't), and what's next.
ATProtocol Attestations: Cryptographic Signatures for the Decentralized Web - Nick's Blog
This post introduces the formal ATProtocol attestation specification, a framework for adding cryptographic signatures to ATProto records through two complementary patterns: inline attestations that embed signatures directly in records, and remote attestations that store proof in separate repository records. The specification prevents replay attacks through repository binding, uses CID-based content addressing for integrity, and provides the cryptographic foundation for verified credentials, trusted content, and authenticated interactions in the decentralized ATProtocol ecosystem.
A Cryptography Engineer’s Perspective on Quantum Computing Timelines
The risk that cryptographically-relevant quantum computers materialize within the next few years is now high enough to be dispositive, unfortunately.
A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt
Let’s Encrypt is committed to a post-quantum-safe Web PKI. The path we’re planning to take is Merkle Tree Certificates (“MTCs”), a new approach that adds post-quantum authentication to the web without sacrificing the speed and reliability that have made TLS universal. This post is about these plans and why we believe MTCs are worth pursuing as a key to a post-quantum future. An increasingly urgent problem For much of the last several years, the conversation about post-quantum cryptography has been a conversation about encryption. The reasoning was straightforward: an attacker who records encrypted traffic today might be able to decrypt it years from now once quantum computers can break the underlying math. Authentication, the part of TLS that indicates a server is who it says it is, has been a less urgent problem. A quantum computer needs to forge a signature in real time, not retroactively, so threats to authentication hinge on the existence of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC).
