Welcome to /r/crypto's weekly community thread!

This thread is a place where people can freely discuss broader topics (but NO cryptocurrency spam, see the sidebar), perhaps even share some memes (but please keep the worst offenses contained to /r/shittycrypto), engage with the community, discuss meta topics regarding the subreddit itself (such as discussing the customs and subreddit rules, etc), etc.

Keep in mind that the standard reddiquette rules still apply, i.e. be friendly and constructive!

So, what's on your mind? Comment below!

Hi, I’m currently writing my bachelor thesis about factoring Algorithms. One of them is Pollard Rho, so here is my question:

In his paper Pollard states that the pseudorandom sequence: $x{i+1}=x{i}^{2}$ shouldn’t be used for his algorithm. Why so?

I did some research and found out that although the sequence is limited to the set of quadratic residue Modulo N, the (BBS) sequence passes as a pseudonumber generator sequence.

Is it because the sequence has fixed-points (mainly 0 and 1) for all N? Somewhere else I read that the sequence can cause degenerate cycles and that the sequence is to structured. If so, do you maybe know papers that can confirm this claim so I can cite them? I can’t really find any…

I’d really appreciate your help! Thanks in advance :) (Sorry, if my English is bad I’m not native.)

I have learnt that Classic McEliece made it to round 3 of NIST but was rejected

in favor of Kyber for ML-KEM.

McEliece was introduced in 1978--around the same time as RSA and remains resistant to classical and post-quantum cryptanalysis to this day.

I am just asking for a quick summary on why Classic McEliece was rejected.

The NIST Classic McEliece page says that it was may lead to the creation of "incompatible standards".

What were the detailed reasons for NIST's rejection.

I am interested in auditing cryptographic source code on my spare time.

Some of the projects I am considering auditing include GNUPG, Sequoia-PGP, Mullvad, and Rustls.

For those of you who have experience auditing cryptographic source code what advice would you give?

I thank all in advance for any responses.

Multi-party computation and fully homomorphic encryption both promise privacy-preserving AI, but are either realistic yet for running LLMs at scale? Curious if anyone has benchmarks or real deployments to share.

Welcome to /r/crypto's weekly community thread!

This thread is a place where people can freely discuss broader topics (but NO cryptocurrency spam, see the sidebar), perhaps even share some memes (but please keep the worst offenses contained to /r/shittycrypto), engage with the community, discuss meta topics regarding the subreddit itself (such as discussing the customs and subreddit rules, etc), etc.

Keep in mind that the standard reddiquette rules still apply, i.e. be friendly and constructive!

So, what's on your mind? Comment below!

I was studying Menezes Qu Vanstone from Serious Cryptography 2nd Edition. Aumasson mentions MQV is elegant and more secure than Authenticated Diffie-Hellman.

You cannot break MQV just by leaking ephemeral secrets.

Even if a long-term key is compromised the previously established keys are safe since they were derived using ephemeral secrets.

It does *not* offer perfect forward secrecy (although both users can do a key confirmation step to mitigate that).

I was just wondering...are there any cases in real life where MQV is preferable in practice over Authenticated Diffie-Hellman?

I thank in advance for any responses!

Hey guys,

I’ve been working on an experimental encryption concept called VEINN (Vector Encrypted Invertible Neural Network) and I’d love to get feedback from you guys. I’m new to this field, but come with 25 YoE in software engineering… so please be gentle.

The core idea is to step away from the typical discrete integer/algebraic spaces used in most ciphers and instead: • Vectorize plaintext into a continuous high-dimensional space (normalized float vectors in -1, 1) • Apply invertible neural network (INN) layers for nonlinear, reversible transformations • Add key-derived deterministic noise for security while maintaining perfect invertibility for legitimate decryption • Allow scalable hardness through configurable layer depth, noise profiles, and vector dimensions

While it’s currently a symmetric scheme (and thus already not directly vulnerable to Shor’s algorithm), the architecture could be extended toward asymmetric variants or combined with existing PQC standards for hybrid encryption.

A few points of interest: • Encryption is performed in a continuous space, leveraging numerical instability and precision sensitivity as an additional hardness factor. • Layer parameters and noise vary entirely based on the key, so two encryptions of the same message look unrelated. • While not a formal PQC candidate, the architecture could wrap or hybridize with lattice-based or code-based schemes.

I know the scheme hasn’t undergone formal cryptanalysis, so this is purely experimental and research-oriented at this stage. That said, I’m particularly interested in thoughts on: • Potential attack surfaces I may not have considered • Comparisons to known continuous-space or neural-network-based encryption research • Whether the polymorphic nature and scaling parameters could realistically add hardness

Would love to hear what the experts here think, whether it’s “this could be interesting” or “here’s why this breaks instantly.”

You can check out the “white paper” and “research paper” along with an end-to-end to model built in python at the github link I’ve shared.

You might also notice the TRIP and KSNVT documentation which is kinda a progress that resulted in my VEINN project.

Thanks a bunch for taking some time to take a look at what I’m researching, and I appreciate any feedback.

Hi

I am new to understanding how to be more secure online. I bought two Nitrokey 3C NFC keys, one for a primary, and one for a backup. I have successfully gone into terminal on my Macbook M1 Air and also my M1 Macbook Pro. I am not sure how to set it up on my original android pixel fold. I haven't researched it enough. Does anyone have experience using Nitrokeys with android?

Question: Do I just set the same passkey for both 2FA physical nitrokeys? That's what I did. I wasn't sure how to do it exactly, so on my google account, I set it up the same, but they have different names.

I am new to understanding 2FA technology. I am wanting my Macbook Air M1 to be as secure as possible, but am opting out of installing Linux on it because I hear it is problematic on the M series. Later in the year, I hope to buy a linux PC.

Question: what do I do with software that doesn't support physical 2FA keys? What I did was just use my google aauthenticator app. Is there a better authenticator app I could use?

Is there something more I could do to secure my M1 Macbook air and my M1 macbook pro? I am great at research and have the ability to consume complex information, if you could share some deep info like research papers or things like that to wrap my head around cryptography, that would be great.

I am thrilled so far with my Nitrokeys. I set them up on my discord, on my gmail and on my brave browser. I don't understand how it senses my touch on the key. It doesn't seem to be reading my fingerprint, because I didn't register it with one, but it blinks and then I touch it and then it is happy again, or it verifies my identity. Like I said, I am new.

Thanks in advance!

update: I set them up in my gmail, brave, discord, but have not used the Nitrokey app to manage my two keys. Did I mess up and need to redo it?

i wanted the signal protocol in javascript that would be able to run in the browser.

• https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/1mi4ooa/looking_for_the_signal_protocol_in_javascript
• https://www.reddit.com/r/cryptography/comments/1mi5z1b/looking_for_the_signal_protocol_in_javascript

i decided to get AI to teach me with examples.

• https://cryptography.positive-intentions.com/?path=/story/signal-protocol-x3dh-key-exchange--educational-guide
• https://github.com/positive-intentions/cryptography

i had it create this page to teach me how to use the signal protocol in javascript. and while im still studying this, i wanted to share it with you guys if there was anything i could do to make this better.

im already aware that its pretty uncool to ask people to review my code in their spare time... and worse when its vibecoded like this. im not asking you to review my slop if you dont want to. i would find it helpful.

IMPORTANT NOTICE:

this code is not production ready. it is a learning tool and should not be used in any production environment. it is provided as-is, without any guarantees or warranties. the code is intended for my learning with the aim to to use this functionality in my own projects. its important that people understand that my code is not reviewed by any experts. and that i am not an expert myself.

---

regarding Rule 8 of this sub... i vibecoded this over several sessions. mostly with Claude code and there were often time where i cleared the changes and started again. i didnt record my prompts, but i think they were fairly basic. the repo here is large created manually, and the setup for things like module federation was set up long before working on the changes for the signal protocol. a rough way i was prompting would be along the lines:

- "i want to create the signal protocol in javascript to run on the browser. before you do that i want you to create unit tests"

- "i want you to create an implementation for the signal protocol tests to pass."

- various points where i told it "i want a better explination here with code snippets" or "<this> isnt working. fix it. the console output looks like this."

Welcome to /r/crypto's weekly community thread!

This thread is a place where people can freely discuss broader topics (but NO cryptocurrency spam, see the sidebar), perhaps even share some memes (but please keep the worst offenses contained to /r/shittycrypto), engage with the community, discuss meta topics regarding the subreddit itself (such as discussing the customs and subreddit rules, etc), etc.

Keep in mind that the standard reddiquette rules still apply, i.e. be friendly and constructive!

So, what's on your mind? Comment below!

I have heard of several complaints about the difficulty of using PGP including Matt Green's blog:

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/08/13/whats-matter-with-pgp/

And yet critical projects for privacy such as Tor continue to sign releases of their code using GNUPG.

In a report on:

"Advanced Instructions on Using GNUPG" (https://www.gnupg.org/ftp/people/neal/an-advanced-introduction-to-gnupg/an-advanced-introduction-to-gnupg.pdf)

the CISO of the Organized Crime and CorruptionReport Project (OCCRP) admits

journalists would not be safe without it.

Why is it that developers, journalists, and whisteblowers continue to use GNUPG if it is

difficult to handle properly and has suffered security vulnerabilities.

I'm looking for the signal protocol for frontend JavaScript that can run purely on a browser. I came across this:

https://github.com/signalapp/libsignal-protocol-javascript

This seems to be deprecated and suggests to use this other repo for it here:

https://github.com/signalapp/libsignal

I could take a look there and adapt it into clientside javascript, but wondering if there is already something out there for this?

It s beleived only Kim Jung un has the possibility to use nuclear bombs. On the other end, the fear of renagade generals is greater than in other pollitical regime means authentication is required in order to prevent any impersonation of the dear leader to remote launche sites like submarines.

But since North Korea is the only country in the world to never receive help from Washington for setting up nuclear codes, what s the technology employed? Kim Jung un being the only person holding the to be broadcasted firmware so that the fissile hardware can be turned into a nuclear explosion?

Welcome to /r/crypto's weekly community thread!

This thread is a place where people can freely discuss broader topics (but NO cryptocurrency spam, see the sidebar), perhaps even share some memes (but please keep the worst offenses contained to /r/shittycrypto), engage with the community, discuss meta topics regarding the subreddit itself (such as discussing the customs and subreddit rules, etc), etc.

Keep in mind that the standard reddiquette rules still apply, i.e. be friendly and constructive!

So, what's on your mind? Comment below!

Lets imagine a scenario where you're coerced whether through threats, torture, or even legal pressure to reveal the password to your secure vault. 

In countries like the US, UK, and Australia, refusing to provide passwords to law enforcement can result months in prison in certain cases.

I invented a solution called Veilith ( veilith.com ) addresses this critical vulnerability with perfect deniable encryption. It supports multiple passwords, each unlocking distinct blocks of encrypted data that are indistinguishable from random noise even to experts. And have a lot of different features to protect your intellectual properties.

In high-stakes situations, simply provide a decoy password and plausibly deny the existence of anything more. 

Dive deeper by reading the whitepaper, exploring the open-source code, or asking me any questions you may have.

I’ve been exploring the idea of using DRAM access behavior — specifically memory bandwidth patterns and latency variance — as a way to generate a validator integrity score. Not for random number generation or consensus replacement, but as a supplemental metric for trust scoring or anomaly detection.

For example: • Could periodic memory state checks serve as a “heartbeat” to detect hardware spoofing or entropy manipulation? • Could ZK-SNARKs or MPC attest to hardware-level state ranges without exposing raw memory data? • Could AI agents (off-chain) flag suspicious behavior by learning “normal” patterns of memory usage per validator?

I’m aware this doesn’t replace coin-flip or commitment schemes, and entropy alone isn’t enough — but could this augment existing cryptographic trust layers?

Would love to hear from anyone who’s worked on similar ideas, especially in: • zk-based side-channel attestation • multiparty hardware verification • entropy-hardening at runtime • or DRAM-based randomness models

Happy to be proven wrong — or pointed to any research we might be missing.

Edit: Added additional technical details and references in the comments below.