Abstract: This Article updates and expands on 2012 research on encryption and globalization, analyzing what the authors call “Round 3” of the Going Dark Debate: the current controversies over end-to-end encryption (E2EE). Governments around the world have proposed, and in some cases enacted, laws limiting E2EE for law enforcement and national security purposes.

This Article explains the underlying technologies and market developments for a law and policy audience to assess those proposals critically. The Article proceeds in three parts tracking three rounds of the Going Dark Debate. Round 1 covers the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, when U.S. export controls on strong encryption ultimately fell in 1999. Round 2 covers the period roughly 2010 to 2015, when encryption-in-transit became widespread but lawful access remained available through cloud providers, giving rise to what the authors called a “golden age of surveillance” rather than a period of going dark. Round 3 addresses the current debate over E2EE, where no entity between sender and recipient can read the plaintext...

In November 2023, a large cache of his wartime papers—nicknamed the “Bayley papers”—was auctioned in London for almost half a million U.S. dollars. The previously unknown cache contains many sheets in Turing’s own handwriting, telling of his top-secret “Delilah” engineering project from 1943 to 1945. Delilah was Turing’s portable voice-encryption system, named after the biblical deceiver of men. There is also material written by Bayley, often in the form of notes he took while Turing was speaking. It is thanks to Bayley that the papers survived: He kept them until he died in 2020, 66 years after Turing passed away...

France’s cybersecurity agency ANSSI said on Tuesday it would stop certifying security products that lack quantum-resistant encryption, a move that will force government bodies and critical operators to shift away from older systems.

Samih Souissi, ANSSI’s chief of staff, said at the France Quantum conference that the agency would halt such certifications from 2027, and that businesses should be buying only quantum-safe products by 2030.

ANSSI approval is required for use in French government agencies and critical infrastructure, making the policy a de facto phase-out of older encryption...

The badkeys project is an open-source service that checks public keys for known vulnerabilities. While developing this tool, Hanno collected a massive number of real-world keys from public sources, including Certificate Transparency logs, internet-wide TLS and SSH scans, PGP keys, and many others. By searching this dataset for unexpectedly sparse RSA moduli, we uncovered a large number of keys in the wild with the patterns in Figure 1...

In a security alert dated March 26, the U.S. Consulate General said that, on March 23, 2026, Hong Kong authorities changed the rules governing enforcement of the National Security Law. Under the revised framework, police can require individuals to provide passwords or other assistance to access personal electronic devices, including cellphones and laptops.

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If the “design choices create liability” framework seems worrying in the abstract, the New Mexico case provides a concrete example of where it leads in practice.

One of the key pieces of evidence the New Mexico attorney general used against Meta was the company’s 2023 decision to add end-to-end encryption to Facebook Messenger. The argument went like this: predators used Messenger to groom minors and exchange child sexual abuse material. By encrypting those messages, Meta made it harder for law enforcement to access evidence of those crimes. Therefore, the encryption was a design choice that enabled harm...

of the most visible holdouts in supporting RC4 has been Microsoft. Eventually, Microsoft upgraded Active Directory to support the much more secure AES encryption standard. But by default, Windows servers have continued to respond to RC4-based authentication requests and return an RC4-based response. The RC4 fallback has been a favorite weakness hackers have exploited to compromise enterprise networks. Use of RC4 played a ...

Abstract: In this article, I investigate the hypothesis that the Voynich Manuscript (MS 408, Yale University Beinecke Library) is compatible with being a ciphertext by attempting to develop a historically plausible cipher that can replicate the manuscript’s unusual properties. The resulting cipher­a verbose homophonic substitution cipher I call the Naibbe cipher­can be done entirely by hand with 15th-century materials, and when it encrypts a wide range of Latin and Italian plaintexts, the resulting ciphertexts remain fully decipherable and also reliably reproduce many key statistical properties of the Voynich Manuscript at once. My results suggest that the so-called “ciphertext hypothesis” for the Voynich Manuscript remains viable, while also placing constraints on plausible substitution cipher structures...

For this election and in accordance with the bylaws of the IACR, the three members of the IACR 2025 Election Committee acted as independent trustees, each holding a portion of the cryptographic key material required to jointly decrypt the results. This aspect of Helios’ design ensures that no two trustees could collude to determine the outcome of an election or the contents of individual votes on their own: all trustees must provide their decryption shares...

From the vantage point of today, it’s surreal reading about the commercial cryptography business in the 1970s. Nobody knew anything. The manufacturers didn’t know whether the cryptography they sold was any good. The customers didn’t know whether the crypto they bought was any good. Everyone pretended to know, thought they knew, or knew better than to even try to know.

The Business of Secrets is the self-published memoirs of Fred Kinch. He was founder and vice president of—mostly sales—at a US cryptographic hardware company called Datotek, from company’s founding in 1969 until 1982. It’s mostly a disjointed collection of stories about the difficulties of selling to governments worldwide, along with descriptions of the highs and (mostly) lows of foreign airlines, foreign hotels, and foreign travel in general. But it’s also about encryption...

Ars Technica has a really good article with details:

Ultimately, the architects settled on a creative solution. Rather than bolt KEM onto the existing double ratchet, they allowed it to remain more or less the same as it had been. Then they used the new quantum-safe ratchet to implement a parallel secure messaging system.

Now, when the protocol encrypts a message, it sources encryption keys from both the classic Double Ratchet and the new ratchet. It then mixes the two keys together (using a cryptographic key derivation function) to get a new encryption key that has all of the security of the classical Double Ratchet but now has quantum security, too...

We pointed a commercial-off-the-shelf satellite dish at the sky and carried out the most comprehensive public study to date of geostationary satellite communication. A shockingly large amount of sensitive traffic is being broadcast unencrypted, including critical infrastructure, internal corporate and government communications, private citizens’ voice calls and SMS, and consumer Internet traffic from in-flight wifi and mobile networks. This data can be passively observed by anyone with a few hundred dollars of consumer-grade hardware. There are thousands of geostationary satellite transponders globally, and data from a single transponder may be visible from an area as large as 40% of the surface of the earth...

In security, threat modeling is the process of determining what security measures make sense in your particular situation. It’s a way to think about potential risks, possible defenses, and the costs of both. It’s how experts avoid being distracted by irrelevant risks or overburdened by undue costs...

Three Dutch security analysts discovered the vulnerabilities­—five in total—­in a European radio standard called TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio), which is used in radios made by Motorola, Damm, Hytera, and others. The standard has been used in radios since the ’90s, but the flaws remained unknown because encryption algorithms used in TETRA were kept secret until now.

There’s new news:

In 2023, Carlo Meijer, Wouter Bokslag, and Jos Wetzels of security firm Midnight Blue, based in the Netherlands, discovered vulnerabilities in encryption algorithms that are part of a European radio standard created by ETSI called TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio), which has been baked into radio systems made by Motorola, Damm, Sepura, and others since the ’90s. The flaws remained unknown publicly until their disclosure, because ETSI refused for decades to let anyone examine the proprietary algorithms...

The auction, which will include other items related to cryptology, will be held Nov. 20. RR Auction, the company arranging the sale, estimates a winning bid between $300,000 and $500,000.

Along with the original handwritten plain text of K4 and other papers related to the coding, Mr. Sanborn will also be providing a 12-by-18-inch copper plate that has three lines of alphabetic characters cut through with a jigsaw, which he calls “my proof-of-concept piece” and which he kept on a table for inspiration during the two years he and helpers hand-cut the letters for the project. The process was grueling, exacting and nerve wracking. “You could not make any mistake with 1,800 letters,” he said. “It could not be repaired.”...