Cryptography FM

Episode 24: CryptoHack's Collection of Cryptic Conundrums!

For several years, CryptoHack has been a free platform for learning modern cryptography through fun and challenging programming puzzles. From toy ciphers to post-quantum

Episode 23: Psychic Signatures in Java!

On April 19th 2022, Neil Madden disclosed a vulnerability in many popular Java runtimes and development kits. The vulnerability, dubbed "Psychic Signatures", lies in the

Episode 22: Three Lessons from Threema: Breaking a Secure Messenger!

Threema is a Swiss encrypted messaging application. It has more than 10 million users and more than 7000 on-premise customers. Prominent users of Threema include the Swis

Episode 21: Proving Fundamental Equivalencies in Isogeny Mathematics!

Benjamin Wesolowski talks about his latest paper in which he mathematically proved that the two fundamental problems underlying isogeny-based cryptography are equivalent.

Episode 20: Cryptanalysis of GPRS: GEA-1 and GEA-2!

A team of cryptanalysits presents the first publicly available cryptanalytic attacks on the GEA-1 and GEA-2 algorithms. Instead of providing full 64-bit security, they sh

Episode 19: Cross-Protocol Attacks on TLS with ALPACA!

TLS is an internet standard to secure the communication between servers and clients on the internet, for example that of web servers, FTP servers, and Email servers. This

Episode 18: Optimizing Cryptography for Microcontrollers!

Nadim talks with Peter Schwabe and Matthias Kannwischer about the considerations — both in terms of security and performance — when implementing cryptographic primitives

Episode 17: Breaking Wi-Fi With Frame Attacks!

Wi-Fi is a pretty central technology to our daily lives, whether at home or at the office. Given that so much sensitive data is regularly exchanged between Wi-Fi devices,

Episode 16: Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers!

Contact discovery is a core feature in popular mobile messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram that lets users grant access to their address book in order to

Episode 15: Bringing Secure Multiparty Computation to the Real World!

Secure multi-party computation is a fascinating field in cryptography, researching how to allow multiple parties to compute secure operations over inputs while keeping th

Episode 14: Schnorr, Factoring and Lattices!

On March 1st, 2021, a curious paper appeared on the Cryptology ePrint Archive: senior cryptographer Claus Peter Schnorr submitted research that claims to use lattice math

Episode 13: Zero-Knowledge STARKs in the Real World!

Zero-Knowledge proofs have broadened the realm of use cases for applied cryptography over the past decade, from privacy-enhanced cryptocurrencies to applications in votin

Episode 12: Special Real World Crypto 2021 Pre-Conference Coverage!

Every year, the IACR Real World Cryptography symposium brings together researchers, engineers and practitioners in applied cryptography to discuss cryptography that matte

Episode 11: Breaking the Rainbow Post-Quantum Cryptography Candidate!

The race for post-quantum cryptographic signature primitives is in its final lap over at NIST, which recently announced DILITHIUM, FALCON and Rainbow as the three signatu

Episode 10: Exploiting Authenticated Encryption Key Commitment!

Authenticated encryption such as AES-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305 is used in a wide variety of applications, including potentially in settings for which it was not originally

Episode 9: Off-the-Record Messaging and PKI Implementations!

Before there was Signal, before there was WhatsApp, the realm of secure encrypted messaging was ruled by the Off-the-Record secure messaging protocol, created as an alter

Episode‌ ‌8:‌ ‌Breaking‌ ‌Elliptic-Curve‌ ‌Signatures‌ ‌With‌ ‌LadderLeak!‌

Elliptic-curve signatures have become a highly used cryptographic primitive in secure messaging, TLS as well as in cryptocurrencies due to their high speed benefits over

Episode 7: Scaling Up Secure Messaging to Large Groups With MLS!

Secure messaging protocols like Signal have succeeded at making end-to-end encryption the norm in messaging more generally. Whether you’re using WhatsApp, Wire, Facebook

Episode 6: Proving the Existence of Vulnerabilities With Zero-Knowledge Proofs!

Zero-knowledge proofs have been a notorious research target ever since Zcash and other cryptocurrencies have invented lots of new use cases for them. Range proofs, bullet

Episode 5: Isogeny-based Cryptography for Dummies!

The NIST post-quantum competition has started a race for post-quantum cryptography. As a result, we’ve seen a great deal of research into alternative hard mathematical pr