Tootfinder

The crypto community's reaction to Musk's claim that he is using "Bitcoin-style encryption" (which isn't a thing) in his new messaging service XChats is so much fun.
Elon Musk says X’s DM feature XChat to have ‘Bitcoin-style encryption’
https://cointelegraph.com/news/elo…

Presto: Hardware Acceleration of Ciphers for Hybrid Homomorphic Encryption
Yeonsoo Jeon, Mattan Erez, Michael Orshansky
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00367 ht…

Presto: Hardware Acceleration of Ciphers for Hybrid Homomorphic Encryption
Hybrid Homomorphic Encryption (HHE) combines symmetric key and homomorphic encryption to reduce ciphertext expansion crucial in client-server deployments of HE. Special symmetric ciphers, amenable to efficient HE evaluation, have been developed. Their client-side deployment calls for performant and energy-efficient implementation, and in this paper we develop and evaluate hardware accelerators for the two known CKKS-targeting HHE ciphers, HERA and Rubato. We design vectorized and overlapped f…

Excellent article by @… , a staff writer for Privacy Guides, on the risks of government overreach to privacy.
This section focuses on the issue of chat control:

Lock Prediction for Zero-Downtime Database Encryption
Mohamed Sami Rakha, Adam Sorrenti, Greg Stager, Walid Rjaibi, Andriy Miranskyy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23985

Lock Prediction for Zero-Downtime Database Encryption
Modern enterprise database systems face significant challenges in balancing data security and performance. Ensuring robust encryption for sensitive information is critical for systems' compliance with security standards. Although holistic database encryption provides strong protection, existing database systems often require a complete backup and restore cycle, resulting in prolonged downtime and increased storage usage. This makes it difficult to implement online encryption techniques in high-…

from my link log —
ChaCha12-BLAKE3: secure, simple and fast authenticated and committing encryption for any CPU.
https://kerkour.com/chacha12-blake3
saved 2025-08-08

Paris-based Zama, which is developing fully homomorphic encryption tech for blockchain and AI apps, raised a $57M Series B at a $1B valuation (Cate Lawrence/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2025/06/25/zama-becomes-1st-i-fhe-unicorn…

Zama becomes 1st fully homomorphic encryption unicorn with $57M raise
French open source cryptography company Zama today announced a $57 million Series B funding round co-led by Blockchange Ventures and Pantera Capital, bringing Zama’s total funding to over $150 million, and its valuation to north of a billion USD.  Founded by Dr Pascal Paillier and Dr Rand Hindi, the company is building state-of-the-art Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) solutions for blockchain. Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) allows computations to be performed on encrypted data without…

Analogy between Learning With Error Problem and Ill-Posed Inverse Problems
Gaurav Mittal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21653 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21653

Analogy between Learning With Error Problem and Ill-Posed Inverse Problems
In this work, we unveil an analogy between well-known lattice based learning with error problem and ill-posed inverse problems. We show that LWE problem is a structured inverse problem. Further, we propose a symmetric encryption scheme based on ill-posed problems and thoroughly discuss its security. Finally, we propose a public key encryption scheme based on our symmetric encryption scheme and CRYSTALS-Kyber KEM (key encapsulation mechanism) and discuss its security.

Metacurity is pleased to offer our free and premium subscribers a weekly digest of the best long-form (and longish) infosec-related pieces we couldn't properly fit into our daily news crush.
This week's selection covers
--The scary rise of a DOGE worker to the pinnacle of power,
--Conti was a well-oiled criminal enterprise,
--China uses cyber attribution to paint Taiwan as aggressive,
-- Illusions can bypass moderation to spread hate,
--US has optio…

Best infosec-related long reads for the week of 7/26/25
The scary rise of a DOGE worker to the pinnacle of power, Conti was a well-oiled criminal enterprise, China uses cyber attribution to paint Taiwan as aggressive, Illusions can bypass moderation to spread hate, US has options to counter UK demand for encryption backdoors

Cryptanalysis of LC-MUME: A Lightweight Certificateless Multi-User Matchmaking Encryption for Mobile Devices
Ramprasad Sarkar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22674 https://

Cryptanalysis of LC-MUME: A Lightweight Certificateless Multi-User Matchmaking Encryption for Mobile Devices
Yang et al. proposed a lightweight certificateless multiuser matchmaking encryption (LC-MUME) scheme for mobile devices, published in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS) (DOI: 10.1109/TIFS.2023.3321961). Their construction aims to reduce computational and communication overhead within a one-to-many certificateless cryptographic framework. The authors claim that their scheme satisfies existential unforgeability under chosen-message attacks (EUF-CMA) in the random oracl…

If you are a citizen of the EU and are concerned about government surveillance of our private chats, photographs and documents, it is important to take action before October. This tool: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ will easily enable you to draft an email to send to your MEPs.
Specifically,

Parrondo paradox in quantum image encryption
{\L}ukasz Pawela
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16382 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16382

Parrondo paradox in quantum image encryption
We present a quantum image encryption protocol that harnesses discrete-time quantum walks (DTQWs) on cycles and explicitly examines the role of the Parrondo paradox in security. Using the NEQR representation, a DTQW-generated probability mask is transformed into a quantum key image and applied via CNOT to encrypt grayscale images. We adopt an efficient circuit realization of DTQWs based on QFT-diagonalization and coin-conditioned phase layers, yielding low depth for $N=2^n$ positions and $t$ st…

Cyber Attacks Detection, Prevention, and Source Localization in Digital Substation Communication using Hybrid Statistical-Deep Learning
Nicola Cibin, Bas Mulder, Herman Carstens, Peter Palensky, Alexandru \c{S}tefanov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00522

Cyber Attacks Detection, Prevention, and Source Localization in Digital Substation Communication using Hybrid Statistical-Deep Learning
The digital transformation of power systems is accelerating the adoption of IEC 61850 standard. However, its communication protocols, including Sampled Values (SV), lack built-in security features such as authentication and encryption, making them vulnerable to malicious packet injection. Such cyber attacks can delay fault clearance or trigger unintended circuit breaker operations. While most existing research focuses on detecting cyber attacks in digital substations, intrusion prevention syste…

UK ‘agrees to drop’ demand over Apple iCloud encryption, US intelligence head claims https://therecord.media/uk-agrees-drop-apple-encryption

Some Mathematical Problems Behind Lattice-Based Cryptography
Chuanming Zong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23438 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

Some Mathematical Problems Behind Lattice-Based Cryptography
In 1994, P. Shor discovered quantum algorithms which can break both the RSA cryptosystem and the ElGamal cryptosystem. In 2007, D-Wave demonstrated the first quantum computer. These events and further developments have brought a crisis to secret communication. In 2016, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched a global project to solicit and select a handful of encryption algorithms with the ability to resist quantum computer attacks. In 2022, it announced four candidat…

With moving my calendar away from Google I was looking for a Caldev solution, but ...
Interesting take on CalDev and encryption on Cryptpad's github page.
No chance that that will happen encrypted.
It's waiting for an solution in the Caldev protocol. 😇
[Feature request] Possibility to have CalDAV for the Calendar · Issue #823 · cryptpad/cryptpad

Malleability-Resistant Encrypted Control System with Disturbance Compensation and Real-Time Attack Detection
Naoki Aizawa, Keita Emura, Kiminao Kogiso
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22693

Malleability-Resistant Encrypted Control System with Disturbance Compensation and Real-Time Attack Detection
This study proposes an encrypted PID control system with a disturbance observer (DOB) using a keyed-homomorphic encryption (KHE) scheme, aiming to achieve control performance while providing resistance to malleability-based attacks. The controller integrates a DOB with a PID structure to compensate for modeling uncertainties by estimating and canceling external disturbances. To enhance security, the system is designed to output error symbols when ciphertexts are falsified during decryption or e…

Optimizing Indoor RIS-Aided Physical-Layer Security: A Codebook-Generation Methodology and Measurement-Based Analysis
Dimitris Kompostiotis, Dimitris Vordonis, Vassilis Paliouras, George C. Alexandropoulos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22082

Optimizing Indoor RIS-Aided Physical-Layer Security: A Codebook-Generation Methodology and Measurement-Based Analysis
Sixth-Generation (6G) wireless networks aim to support innovative Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications that demand faster and more secure data transmission. While higher Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) layers employ measures like encryption and secure protocols to address data security, Physical-Layer Security (PLS) focuses on preventing information leakage to EavesDroppers (EDs) and mitigating the effects of jammers and spoofing attacks. In this context, the emerging technology of Reconfig…

At the #igf2025 session on encryption and safety, they seem to be more interested in talking about tertiary issues like funding and skills shortage, but only after having the FBI share their perspectives.
Not a useful session, too one-sided, and with too little discussion on principles that actually help solve the balancing issues. 😟
E.g. principles like "Do not introduce solution…

IGF 2025: WS #241 Balancing Acts 2.0: Can Encrypti...
View more about this event at IGF 2025

A Systematic Review of Security Vulnerabilities in Smart Home Devices and Mitigation Techniques
Mohammed K. Alzaylaee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01018 http…

A Systematic Review of Security Vulnerabilities in Smart Home Devices and Mitigation Techniques
Smart homes that integrate Internet of Things (IoT) devices face increasing cybersecurity risks, posing significant challenges to these environments. The study explores security threats in smart homes ecosystems, categorizing them into vulnerabilities at the network layer, device level, and those from cloud-based and AI-driven systems. Research findings indicate that post-quantum encryption, coupled with AI-driven anomaly detection, is highly effective in enhancing security; however, computatio…

> The encryption algorithm used for the device they examined starts with a 128-bit key, but this gets compressed to 56 bits before it encrypts traffic, making it easier to crack.
The classic approach for large key sizes.
https://arstechnica.com/secur…

Encryption made for police and military radios may be easily cracked
An encryption algorithm can have weaknesses that could allow an attacker to listen in.

SCE-NTT: A Hardware Accelerator for Number Theoretic Transform Using Superconductor Electronics
Sasan Razmkhah, Mingye Li, Zeming Cheng, Robert S. Aviles, Kyle Jackman, Joey Delport, Lieze Schindler, Wenhui Luo, Takuya Suzuki, Mehdi Kamal, Christopher L. Ayala, Coenrad J. Fourie, Nabuyuki Yoshikawa, Peter A. Beerel, Sandeep Gupta, Massoud Pedram
https://…

SCE-NTT: A Hardware Accelerator for Number Theoretic Transform Using Superconductor Electronics
This research explores the use of superconductor electronics (SCE) for accelerating fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), focusing on the Number-Theoretic Transform (NTT), a key computational bottleneck in FHE schemes. We present SCE-NTT, a dedicated hardware accelerator based on superconductive single flux quantum (SFQ) logic and memory, targeting high performance and energy efficiency beyond the limits of conventional CMOS. To address SFQ constraints such as limited dense RAM and restricted fan…

Time to fight, mobilise everybody you know, to stop the creation of backdoors in E2E encryption.
#encryption

Possible End to End to End Encryption: Come Help - Bert Hubert's writings
tl;dr: The European Commission is honestly asking for experts to advise them on ways to institute “effective and lawful access to data for law enforcement”. If you are an expert, I urge you to apply to join this group. You have until September 1st. Do read on for more details! The never-ending battle where police and intelligence services demand more/total access to communications shows no sign of stopping, even in the face of mathematical and practical impossibilities.

Forget ransomware - most firms think quantum computing is the biggest security risk to come: Quantum computers will break modern encryption sooner or later.
🔓 https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/for

Forget ransomware - most firms think quantum computing is the biggest security risk to come
Quantum computers will break modern encryption sooner or later

I would like to see an initiative that evaluates messaging services that promise encryption and document the findings. For example, a service may claim that emails are encrypted and secure. However, if the secret keys are managed on infrastructure controlled by the service without further protection, there are limitations, and I wouldn't call it end-to-end encryption. I think it would be useful to have a neutral web page where users could lookup the security levels of services (or apps).…

A website developed for the UK Home Office's 2022 "flop" anti-encryption campaign has seemingly been hijacked to push a payday loan scheme.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/25/home_office_antiencryption_campaign_website/?m…

UK govt dept website that campaigns against encryption hijacked to advertise ... payday loans
: Company at center of findings blamed SEO on outsourcer

A Framework of Distributed Source Encryption using Mutual Information Security Criterion and the Strong Converse Theorem
Yasutada Oohama, Bagus Santoso
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13294

A Framework of Distributed Source Encryption using Mutual Information Security Criterion and the Strong Converse Theorem
We reinvestigate the general distributed secure source coding based on the common key cryptosystem proposed by Oohama and Santoso (ITW 2021). They proposed a framework of distributed source encryption and derived the necessary and sufficient conditions to have reliable and secure transmission. However, the bounds of the rate region, which specifies both necessary and sufficient conditions to have reliable and secure transmission under the proposed cryptosystem, were derived based on a self-tail…

Privacy-Preserving Drone Navigation Through Homomorphic Encryption for Collision Avoidance
Allan Luedeman, Nicholas Baum, Andrew Quijano, Kemal Akkaya
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14713

Privacy-Preserving Drone Navigation Through Homomorphic Encryption for Collision Avoidance
As drones increasingly deliver packages in neighborhoods, concerns about collisions arise. One solution is to share flight paths within a specific zip code, but this compromises business privacy by revealing delivery routes. For example, it could disclose which stores send packages to certain addresses. To avoid exposing path information, we propose using homomorphic encryption-based comparison to compute path intersections. This allows drones to identify potential collisions without revealing …

Encryption Made for Police and Military Radios May Be Easily Cracked
https://www.wired.com/story/encryption-made-for-police-and-military-radios-may-be-easily-cracked-researchers-find/

Encryption Made for Police and Military Radios May Be Easily Cracked
Researchers found that an encryption algorithm likely used by law enforcement and special forces can have weaknesses that could allow an attacker to listen in.

Action Alert from @… : Tell Congress: Don't Outlaw Encrypted Applications
https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-don-t-outlaw-encrypted…

Tell Congress: Don't Outlaw Encrypted Applications
It shouldn't be against the law to provide an encrypted app. But if the STOP CSAM Act passes, it would make it a crime to offer encryption, because it could "facilitate" the sharing of illegal child abuse material (CSAM)—even if there's no evidence that a platform or service intended to do so. The law would undermine digital security for all internet users, impacting private messaging and email app providers, social media platforms, cloud storage providers, and many other internet intermediar…

No GNOME and no KDE so no Signal Desktop for me...
It would otherwise store its password in the plain, i.e., drop encryption entirely, unless you override it to use a password store. I'm on Sway. No idea what I could do.

The EU (still) wants to scan
your private messages and photos
it’s not too late to act:
Reach out to your Representatives.
#chatcontrol #privacy #CSAM

Hybrid Cryptographic Monitoring System for Side-Channel Attack Detection on PYNQ SoCs
Nishant Chinnasami, Rasha Karakchi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21606 https://

Hybrid Cryptographic Monitoring System for Side-Channel Attack Detection on PYNQ SoCs
AES-128 encryption is theoretically secure but vulnerable in practical deployments due to timing and fault injection attacks on embedded systems. This work presents a lightweight dual-detection framework combining statistical thresholding and machine learning (ML) for real-time anomaly detection. By simulating anomalies via delays and ciphertext corruption, we collect timing and data features to evaluate two strategies: (1) a statistical threshold method based on execution time and (2) a Random…

how does it work with encryption of the links stored at your cloud? @…

This is what I always say: "It doesn't actually matter how cryptographically secure your end-to-end encryption is when 1 entity controls all ends and can instantly update them whenever they want." https://www.moparisthebest.com/against-silos-signal/

Proton launches Lumo, an AI chatbot to summarize documents, generate code, and more and says it will protect users' information via "zero-access" encryption (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/711860/proton-privacy-focused-ai-chatbot

Proton is launching a privacy-focused AI chatbot
Proton is launching a privacy-focused AI chatbot called Lumo. The chatbot can perform a range of tasks while encrypting chats and keeping them off Proton’s servers. 

Shut them down. Easy question
https://infosec.exchange/@steelefortress/115062158543467536

Each week, Metacurity offers our free and paid subscribers a digest of the best long-form (and longish) infosec-related pieces we couldn't properly fit into our daily news crush.
This week's selection covers
--N. Korea's IT worker scheme ensnared a troubled woman,
--Iran is harvesting millions of airline passengers' data,
--Myanmar is isolated in its digital tyranny,
--Pushing the UK to abandon its encryption backdoor,
--The racist hacker …

Best infosec-related long reads for the week of 7/19/25
N. Korea's IT worker scheme ensnared a troubled woman, Iran is harvesting millions of airline passengers' data, Myanmar is isolated in its digital tyranny, Pushing the UK to abandon its encryption backdoor, The racist hacker attacking universities, Making quantum cryptography stronger

Stop reinventing email encryption for fucks sake

QuHE: Optimizing Utility-Cost in Quantum Key Distribution and Homomorphic Encryption Enabled Secure Edge Computing Networks
Liangxin Qian, Yang Li, Jun Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06086

QuHE: Optimizing Utility-Cost in Quantum Key Distribution and Homomorphic Encryption Enabled Secure Edge Computing Networks
Ensuring secure and efficient data processing in mobile edge computing (MEC) systems is a critical challenge. While quantum key distribution (QKD) offers unconditionally secure key exchange and homomorphic encryption (HE) enables privacy-preserving data processing, existing research fails to address the comprehensive trade-offs among QKD utility, HE security, and system costs. This paper proposes a novel framework integrating QKD, transciphering, and HE for secure and efficient MEC. QKD distrib…

Wyden asks White House to scrutinize UK surveillance laws https://therecord.media/wyden-asks-white-house-scrutinize-uk-surveillance-laws-apple

Let's get the basics right for my laptop config:
- encryption during install, not jumping through hoops in partitioning
- wifi easily selected during install
- preferably non-systemd
- software not too outdated
Exactly where FreeBSD could shine, were it not for an unsupported wifi adapter 🤔

Unmasking Performance Gaps: A Comparative Study of Human Anonymization and Its Effects on Video Anomaly Detection
Sara Abdulaziz, Egor Bondarev
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14083

Unmasking Performance Gaps: A Comparative Study of Human Anonymization and Its Effects on Video Anomaly Detection
Advancements in deep learning have improved anomaly detection in surveillance videos, yet they raise urgent privacy concerns due to the collection of sensitive human data. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of anomaly detection performance under four human anonymization techniques, including blurring, masking, encryption, and avatar replacement, applied to the UCF-Crime dataset. We evaluate four anomaly detection methods, MGFN, UR-DMU, BN-WVAD, and PEL4VAD, on the anonymized UCF…

Diving into the rabbithole of multi/hybrid cloud environments with regard to encryption, key-management, certificates, IAM etcetera. Big fun 😀
Always looking for recent and relevant literature on this subject.
#cloud #iam

HE-LRM: Encrypted Deep Learning Recommendation Models using Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Karthik Garimella, Austin Ebel, Gabrielle De Micheli, Brandon Reagen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18150

HE-LRM: Encrypted Deep Learning Recommendation Models using Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is an encryption scheme that not only encrypts data but also allows for computations to be applied directly on the encrypted data. While computationally expensive, FHE can enable privacy-preserving neural inference in the client-server setting: a client encrypts their input with FHE and sends it to an untrusted server. The server then runs neural inference on the encrypted data and returns the encrypted results. The client decrypts the output locally, keeping …

Balancing Privacy and Efficiency: Music Information Retrieval via Additive Homomorphic Encryption
William Zerong Wang, Dongfang Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07044 https://

Balancing Privacy and Efficiency: Music Information Retrieval via Additive Homomorphic Encryption
In the era of generative AI, ensuring the privacy of music data presents unique challenges: unlike static artworks such as images, music data is inherently temporal and multimodal, and it is sampled, transformed, and remixed at an unprecedented scale. These characteristics make its core vector embeddings, i.e, the numerical representations of the music, highly susceptible to being learned, misused, or even stolen by models without accessing the original audio files. Traditional methods like cop…

Restricted Boltzmann machine as a probabilistic Enigma
Bin Chen, Weichao Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17236 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17236

Restricted Boltzmann machine as a probabilistic Enigma
We theoretically propose a symmetric encryption scheme based on Restricted Boltzmann Machines that functions as a probabilistic Enigma device, encoding information in the marginal distributions of visible states while utilizing bias permutations as cryptographic keys. Theoretical analysis reveals significant advantages including factorial key space growth through permutation matrices, excellent diffusion properties, and computational complexity rooted in sharp P-complete problems that resist qu…

I emailed all 14 Irish MEP's regarding the "Chat Control" proposal.
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ @…
I have received a grand total of 1 response (outs…

Protect your privacy – Start now with Signal
 
Autocracies always implement broad surveillance methods in order to identify and punish resistance. Surveillance can take many forms including the capture of your social media posts and email, monitoring your connections to web sites, and preventing the use of private communications through encryption back-doors and other means.
 
Take action now to create ways to communicate privately with your family, friends and colleague…

Secure Multi-Key Homomorphic Encryption with Application to Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning
Jiahui Wu, Tiecheng Sun, Fucai Luo, Haiyan Wang, Weizhe Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20101

Secure Multi-Key Homomorphic Encryption with Application to Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning
Multi-Key Homomorphic Encryption (MKHE), proposed by Lopez-Alt et al. (STOC 2012), allows for performing arithmetic computations directly on ciphertexts encrypted under distinct keys. Subsequent works by Chen and Dai et al. (CCS 2019) and Kim and Song et al. (CCS 2023) extended this concept by proposing multi-key BFV/CKKS variants, referred to as the CDKS scheme. These variants incorporate asymptotically optimal techniques to facilitate secure computation across multiple data providers. In this…

> ... but the government downplayed the danger, saying that encryption prevented access to bad actors.
[multi-decade rhetorical shrug]
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/22/uk-government-laptops-phones-ta…

Leveraging Photonic Interconnects for Scalable and Efficient Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Dewan Saiham, Di Wu, Sazadur Rahman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12962

Leveraging Photonic Interconnects for Scalable and Efficient Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) facilitates secure computations on encrypted data but imposes significant demands on memory bandwidth and computational power. While current FHE accelerators focus on optimizing computation, they often face bandwidth limitations that result in performance bottlenecks, particularly in memory-intensive operations. This paper presents OptoLink, a scalable photonic interconnect architecture designed to address these bandwidth and latency challenges in FHE systems.…

The UK gov't is backtracking on encryption backdoors.
UK government seeks way out of clash with US over Apple encryption
https://www.ft.com/content/3a3e6dbc-591d-4087-9ad3-11af04f0176f

WhatsApp moves to join Apple’s encryption fight with UK government https://therecord.media/whatsapp-uk-encryption-fight-apple

Fight Chat Control – Protect Digital Privacy in the EU: The EU (still) wants to scan your private messages and photos.
The "Chat Control" proposal would mandate scanning of all private digital communications, including encrypted messages and photos. This threatens fundamental privacy rights and digital security for all EU citizens.
🇪🇺 https://

Microarchitecture Design and Benchmarking of Custom SHA-3 Instruction for RISC-V
Alperen Bolat, Sakir Sezer, Kieran McLaughlin, Henry Hui
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20653 https:…

Microarchitecture Design and Benchmarking of Custom SHA-3 Instruction for RISC-V
Integrating cryptographic accelerators into modern CPU architectures presents unique microarchitectural challenges, particularly when extending instruction sets with complex and multistage operations. Hardware-assisted cryptographic instructions, such as Intel's AES-NI and ARM's custom instructions for encryption workloads, have demonstrated substantial performance improvements. However, efficient SHA-3 acceleration remains an open problem due to its distinct permutation-based structure and mem…

Hold on to your hats and check out today's Metacurity for a ton of major infosec developments you might have missed over the weekend, including
--SharePoint server software security flaw sparked global attacks,
--France probes Musk's X over fraudulent data extraction,
--UK backtracks on encryption backdoors,
--Microsoft to stop Chinese digital escorts,
--Russia is kicking WhatsApp out,
--419k impacted by Louis Vuitton Hong Kong breach,
--UNC38…

SharePoint server software security flaw sparked global attacks
France probes Musk's X over fraudulent data extraction, UK backtracks on encryption backdoors, Microsoft to stop Chinese digital escorts, Russia is kicking WhatsApp out, 419k impacted by Louis Vuitton Hong Kong breach, UNC3886 hit Singapore with cyberattack, much more

HEIR: A Universal Compiler for Homomorphic Encryption
Asra Ali, Jaeho Choi, Bryant Gipson, Shruthi Gorantala, Jeremy Kun, Wouter Legiest, Lawrence Lim, Alexander Viand, Meron Zerihun Demissie, Hongren Zheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11095

HEIR: A Universal Compiler for Homomorphic Encryption
This work presents Homomorphic Encryption Intermediate Representation (HEIR), a unified approach to building homomorphic encryption (HE) compilers. HEIR aims to support all mainstream techniques in homomorphic encryption, integrate with all major software libraries and hardware accelerators, and advance the field by providing a platform for research and benchmarking. Built on the MLIR compiler framework, HEIR introduces HE-specific abstraction layers at which existing optimizations and new rese…

POLARIS: Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Mitigating Power Side-Channel Leakage
Tanzim Mahfuz, Sudipta Paria, Tasneem Suha, Swarup Bhunia, Prabuddha Chakraborty
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22177 …

POLARIS: Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Mitigating Power Side-Channel Leakage
Microelectronic systems are widely used in many sensitive applications (e.g., manufacturing, energy, defense). These systems increasingly handle sensitive data (e.g., encryption key) and are vulnerable to diverse threats, such as, power side-channel attacks, which infer sensitive data through dynamic power profile. In this paper, we present a novel framework, POLARIS for mitigating power side channel leakage using an Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) guided masking approach. POLARIS use…

Will Cathcart says WhatsApp plans to support Apple in its legal case against the UK Home Office over weakening encryption, which may "set a dangerous precedent" (Zoe Kleinman/BBC)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgmjrn42wdwo

WhatsApp backs Apple in its legal row with the UK over user data
The messaging app says the UK government's demands over data access could set a "dangerous precedent."

Toward a Lightweight, Scalable, and Parallel Secure Encryption Engine
Rasha Karakchi, Rye Stahle-Smith, Nishant Chinnasami, Tiffany Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15070

Toward a Lightweight, Scalable, and Parallel Secure Encryption Engine
The exponential growth of Internet of Things (IoT) applications has intensified the demand for efficient, high-throughput, and energy-efficient data processing at the edge. Conventional CPU-centric encryption methods suffer from performance bottlenecks and excessive data movement, especially in latency-sensitive and resource-constrained environments. In this paper, we present SPiME, a lightweight, scalable, and FPGA-compatible Secure Processor-in-Memory Encryption architecture that integrates t…

ABC-FHE : A Resource-Efficient Accelerator Enabling Bootstrappable Parameters for Client-Side Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Sungwoong Yune, Hyojeong Lee, Adiwena Putra, Hyunjun Cho, Cuong Duong Manh, Jaeho Jeon, Joo-Young Kim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08461

ABC-FHE : A Resource-Efficient Accelerator Enabling Bootstrappable Parameters for Client-Side Fully Homomorphic Encryption
As the demand for privacy-preserving computation continues to grow, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE)-which enables continuous computation on encrypted data-has become a critical solution. However, its adoption is hindered by significant computational overhead, requiring 10000-fold more computation compared to plaintext processing. Recent advancements in FHE accelerators have successfully improved server-side performance, but client-side computations remain a bottleneck, particularly under boo…

"The Office of Cybersecurity has deemed WhatsApp a high-risk to users due to the lack of transparency in how it protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risks involved with its use."
This follows Iran's ban on WhatsApp.
https://www.axi…

Scoop: WhatsApp banned on House staffers' devices
The House's cybersecurity office deemed the messaging app "high risk" due to its treatment of user data.

Adaptive Variation-Resilient Random Number Generator for Embedded Encryption
Furqan Zahoor, Ibrahim A. Albulushi, Saleh Bunaiyan, Anupam Chattopadhyay, Hesham ElSawy, Feras Al-Dirini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05523

Adaptive Variation-Resilient Random Number Generator for Embedded Encryption
With a growing interest in securing user data within the internet-of-things (IoT), embedded encryption has become of paramount importance, requiring light-weight high-quality Random Number Generators (RNGs). Emerging stochastic device technologies produce random numbers from stochastic physical processes at high quality, however, their generated random number streams are adversely affected by process and supply voltage variations, which can lead to bias in the generated streams. In this work, w…

GUARD-CAN: Graph-Understanding and Recurrent Architecture for CAN Anomaly Detection
Hyeong Seon Kim, Huy Kang Kim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21640 https://…

GUARD-CAN: Graph-Understanding and Recurrent Architecture for CAN Anomaly Detection
Modern in-vehicle networks face various cyber threats due to the lack of encryption and authentication in the Controller Area Network (CAN). To address this security issue, this paper presents GUARD-CAN, an anomaly detection framework that combines graph-based representation learning with time-series modeling. GUARD-CAN splits CAN messages into fixed-length windows and converts each window into a graph that preserves message order. To detect anomalies in the timeaware and structure-aware contex…

Analysis of X's new XChat shows that X can probably decrypt users' messages, as it holds users' private keys on its servers (Matthew Green/A Few Thoughts ...)
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2025/06/09/a-bi…

A bit more on Twitter/X’s new encrypted messaging
Matthew Garrett has a nice post about Twitter (uh, X)’s new end-to-end encryption messaging protocol, which is now called XChat. The TL;DR of Matthew’s post is that from a cryptographic…

SeDA: Secure and Efficient DNN Accelerators with Hardware/Software Synergy
Wei Xuan, Zhongrui Wang, Lang Feng, Ning Lin, Zihao Xuan, Rongliang Fu, Tsung-Yi Ho, Yuzhong Jiao, Luhong Liang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18924

SeDA: Secure and Efficient DNN Accelerators with Hardware/Software Synergy
Ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of DNN accelerators is paramount across various scenarios spanning autonomous driving, healthcare, and finance. However, current security approaches typically require extensive hardware resources, and incur significant off-chip memory access overheads. This paper introduces SeDA, which utilizes 1) a bandwidth-aware encryption mechanism to improve hardware resource efficiency, 2) optimal block granularity through intra-layer and inter-layer tiling patte…

Characterizing the Sensitivity to Individual Bit Flips in Client-Side Operations of the CKKS Scheme
Matias Mazzanti, Augusto Vega, Esteban Mocskos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20891

Characterizing the Sensitivity to Individual Bit Flips in Client-Side Operations of the CKKS Scheme
Homomorphic Encryption (HE) enables computation on encrypted data without decryption, making it a cornerstone of privacy-preserving computation in untrusted environments. As HE sees growing adoption in sensitive applications such as secure machine learning and confidential data analysis ensuring its robustness against errors becomes critical. Faults (e.g., transmission errors, hardware malfunctions, or synchronization failures) can corrupt encrypted data and compromise the integrity of HE opera…

President Trump signs an EO scrapping or revising several Biden- and Obama-era cybersecurity programs, including for AI security and post-quantum cryptography (Eric Geller/Cybersecurity Dive)
https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/tru

Trump scraps Biden software security, AI, post-quantum encryption efforts in new executive order
The White House accused the Biden administration of trying to “sneak problematic and distracting issues into cybersecurity policy.” 

Adaptive Chosen-Ciphertext Security of Distributed Broadcast Encryption
Kwangsu Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10338 https://arxiv.or…

Adaptive Chosen-Ciphertext Security of Distributed Broadcast Encryption
Distributed broadcast encryption (DBE) is a specific kind of broadcast encryption (BE) where users independently generate their own public and private keys, and a sender can efficiently create a ciphertext for a subset of users by using the public keys of the subset users. Previously proposed DBE schemes have been proven in the adaptive chosen-plaintext attack (CPA) security model and have the disadvantage of requiring linear number of pairing operations when verifying the public key of a user.…

PP-STAT: An Efficient Privacy-Preserving Statistical Analysis Framework using Homomorphic Encryption
Hyunmin Choi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12093 https://…

PP-STAT: An Efficient Privacy-Preserving Statistical Analysis Framework using Homomorphic Encryption
With the widespread adoption of cloud computing, the need for outsourcing statistical analysis to third-party platforms is growing rapidly. However, handling sensitive data such as medical records and financial information in cloud environments raises serious privacy concerns. In this paper, we present PP-STAT, a novel and efficient Homomorphic Encryption (HE)-based framework for privacy-preserving statistical analysis. HE enables computations to be performed directly on encrypted data without …

Activate Me!: Designing Efficient Activation Functions for Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning with Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Nges Brian Njungle, Michel A. Kinsy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11575

Activate Me!: Designing Efficient Activation Functions for Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning with Fully Homomorphic Encryption
The growing adoption of machine learning in sensitive areas such as healthcare and defense introduces significant privacy and security challenges. These domains demand robust data protection, as models depend on large volumes of sensitive information for both training and inference. Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) presents a compelling solution by enabling computations directly on encrypted data, maintaining confidentiality across the entire machine learning workflow. However, FHE inherently…

Policy-Driven AI in Dataspaces: Taxonomy, Explainability, and Pathways for Compliant Innovation
Joydeep Chandra, Satyam Kumar Navneet
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20014 https://…

Policy-Driven AI in Dataspaces: Taxonomy, Explainability, and Pathways for Compliant Innovation
As AI-driven dataspaces become integral to data sharing and collaborative analytics, ensuring privacy, performance, and policy compliance presents significant challenges. This paper provides a comprehensive review of privacy-preserving and policy-aware AI techniques, including Federated Learning, Differential Privacy, Trusted Execution Environments, Homomorphic Encryption, and Secure Multi-Party Computation, alongside strategies for aligning AI with regulatory frameworks such as GDPR and the EU…

Breaking the Layer Barrier: Remodeling Private Transformer Inference with Hybrid CKKS and MPC
Tianshi Xu, Wen-jie Lu, Jiangrui Yu, Chen Yi, Chenqi Lin, Runsheng Wang, Meng Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19525

Breaking the Layer Barrier: Remodeling Private Transformer Inference with Hybrid CKKS and MPC
This paper presents an efficient framework for private Transformer inference that combines Homomorphic Encryption (HE) and Secure Multi-party Computation (MPC) to protect data privacy. Existing methods often leverage HE for linear layers (e.g., matrix multiplications) and MPC for non-linear layers (e.g., Softmax activation functions), but the conversion between HE and MPC introduces significant communication costs. The proposed framework, dubbed BLB, overcomes this by breaking down layers into …

FicGCN: Unveiling the Homomorphic Encryption Efficiency from Irregular Graph Convolutional Networks
Zhaoxuan Kan, Husheng Han, Shangyi Shi, Tenghui Hua, Hang Lu, Xiaowei Li, Jianan Mu, Xing Hu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10399

FicGCN: Unveiling the Homomorphic Encryption Efficiency from Irregular Graph Convolutional Networks
Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNs) have gained widespread popularity in various fields like personal healthcare and financial systems, due to their remarkable performance. Despite the growing demand for cloud-based GCN services, privacy concerns over sensitive graph data remain significant. Homomorphic Encryption (HE) facilitates Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning (PPML) by allowing computations to be performed on encrypted data. However, HE introduces substantial computational overhea…

Evaluating Selective Encryption Against Gradient Inversion Attacks
Jiajun Gu, Yuhang Yao, Shuaiqi Wang, Carlee Joe-Wong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04155 https://

Evaluating Selective Encryption Against Gradient Inversion Attacks
Gradient inversion attacks pose significant privacy threats to distributed training frameworks such as federated learning, enabling malicious parties to reconstruct sensitive local training data from gradient communications between clients and an aggregation server during the aggregation process. While traditional encryption-based defenses, such as homomorphic encryption, offer strong privacy guarantees without compromising model utility, they often incur prohibitive computational overheads. To…

Addressing Weak Authentication like RFID, NFC in EVs and EVCs using AI-powered Adaptive Authentication
Onyinye Okoye
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19465 https://

Addressing Weak Authentication like RFID, NFC in EVs and EVCs using AI-powered Adaptive Authentication
The rapid expansion of the Electric Vehicles (EVs) and Electric Vehicle Charging Systems (EVCs) has introduced new cybersecurity challenges, specifically in authentication protocols that protect vehicles, users, and energy infrastructure. Although widely adopted for convenience, traditional authentication mechanisms like Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Near Field Communication (NFC) rely on static identifiers and weak encryption, making them highly vulnerable to attack vectors such as…

Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning against Malicious Clients Based on Verifiable Functional Encryption
Nina Cai, Jinguang Han
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12846

Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning against Malicious Clients Based on Verifiable Functional Encryption
Federated learning is a promising distributed learning paradigm that enables collaborative model training without exposing local client data, thereby protect data privacy. However, it also brings new threats and challenges. The advancement of model inversion attacks has rendered the plaintext transmission of local models insecure, while the distributed nature of federated learning makes it particularly vulnerable to attacks raised by malicious clients. To protect data privacy and prevent malici…

CipherMind: The Longest Codebook in the World
Ming Nie, Zhixiong Yang, Bingsheng Wei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15117 https://arxiv.o…

CipherMind:The Longest Codebook in the World
In recent years, the widespread application of large language models has inspired us to consider using inference for communication encryption. We therefore propose CipherMind, which utilizes intermediate results from deterministic fine-tuning of large model inferences as transmission content. The semantic parameters of large models exhibit characteristics like opaque underlying implementations and weak interpretability, thus enabling their use as an encryption method for data transmission. This…

Can One Safety Loop Guard Them All? Agentic Guard Rails for Federated Computing
Narasimha Raghavan Veeraragavan, Jan Franz Nyg{\aa}rd
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20000

Can One Safety Loop Guard Them All? Agentic Guard Rails for Federated Computing
We propose Guardian-FC, a novel two-layer framework for privacy preserving federated computing that unifies safety enforcement across diverse privacy preserving mechanisms, including cryptographic back-ends like fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and multiparty computation (MPC), as well as statistical techniques such as differential privacy (DP). Guardian-FC decouples guard-rails from privacy mechanisms by executing plug-ins (modular computation units), written in a backend-neutral, domain-spe…

Polyadic encryption
Steven Duplij, Qiang Guo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05683 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05683

Polyadic encryption
A novel original procedure of encryption/decryption based on the polyadic algebraic structures and on signal processing methods is proposed. First, we use signals with integer amplitudes to send information. Then we use polyadic techniques to transfer the plaintext into series of special integers. The receiver restores the plaintext using special rules and systems of equations.

Versatile and Fast Location-Based Private Information Retrieval with Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Torus
Joon Soo Yoo, Taeho Kim, Ji Won Yoon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12761

Versatile and Fast Location-Based Private Information Retrieval with Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Torus
Location-based services often require users to share sensitive locational data, raising privacy concerns due to potential misuse or exploitation by untrusted servers. In response, we present VeLoPIR, a versatile location-based private information retrieval (PIR) system designed to preserve user privacy while enabling efficient and scalable query processing. VeLoPIR introduces three operational modes-interval validation, coordinate validation, and identifier matching-that support a broad range o…

Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning against Malicious Clients Based on Verifiable Functional Encryption
Nina Cai, Jinguang Han
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12846

Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning against Malicious Clients Based on Verifiable Functional Encryption
Federated learning is a promising distributed learning paradigm that enables collaborative model training without exposing local client data, thereby protect data privacy. However, it also brings new threats and challenges. The advancement of model inversion attacks has rendered the plaintext transmission of local models insecure, while the distributed nature of federated learning makes it particularly vulnerable to attacks raised by malicious clients. To protect data privacy and prevent malici…

LINE: Public-key encryption
Gennady Khalimov, Yevgen Kotukh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04501 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04501

LINE: Public-key encryption
We propose a public key encryption cryptosystem based on solutions of linear equation systems with predefinition of input parameters through shared secret computation for factorizable substitutions. The existence of multiple equivalent solutions for an underdetermined system of linear equations determines the impossibility of its resolution by a cryptanalyst in polynomial time. The completion of input parameters of the equation system is implemented through secret homomorphic matrix transformat…

A Relay-Chain-Powered Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption in Intelligent Transportation Systems
Aparna Singh, Geetanjali Rathee, Chaker Abdelaziz Kerrache, Mohamed Chahine Ghanem
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16189

SenseCrypt: Sensitivity-guided Selective Homomorphic Encryption for Joint Federated Learning in Cross-Device Scenarios
Borui Li, Li Yan, Junhao Han, Jianmin Liu, Lei Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04100

SenseCrypt: Sensitivity-guided Selective Homomorphic Encryption for Joint Federated Learning in Cross-Device Scenarios
Homomorphic Encryption (HE) prevails in securing Federated Learning (FL), but suffers from high overhead and adaptation cost. Selective HE methods, which partially encrypt model parameters by a global mask, are expected to protect privacy with reduced overhead and easy adaptation. However, in cross-device scenarios with heterogeneous data and system capabilities, traditional Selective HE methods deteriorate client straggling, and suffer from degraded HE overhead reduction performance. According…

ZAPS: A Zero-Knowledge Proof Protocol for Secure UAV Authentication with Flight Path Privacy
Shayesta Naziri, Xu Wang, Guangsheng Yu, Christy Jie Liang, Wei Ni
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17043

ZAPS: A Zero-Knowledge Proof Protocol for Secure UAV Authentication with Flight Path Privacy
The increasing deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for military, commercial, and logistics applications has raised significant concerns regarding flight path privacy. Conventional UAV communication systems often expose flight path data to third parties, making them vulnerable to tracking, surveillance, and location inference attacks. Existing encryption techniques provide security but fail to ensure complete privacy, as adversaries can still infer movement patterns through metadata an…

Image selective encryption analysis using mutual information in CNN based embedding space
Ikram Messadi, Giulia Cervia, Vincent Itier
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08832 https://…

Image selective encryption analysis using mutual information in CNN based embedding space
As digital data transmission continues to scale, concerns about privacy grow increasingly urgent - yet privacy remains a socially constructed and ambiguously defined concept, lacking a universally accepted quantitative measure. This work examines information leakage in image data, a domain where information-theoretic guarantees are still underexplored. At the intersection of deep learning, information theory, and cryptography, we investigate the use of mutual information (MI) estimators - in pa…

Experimental Evaluation of Post-Quantum Homomorphic Encryption for Privacy-Preserving V2X Communication
Abdullah Al Mamun, Kyle Yates, Antsa Rakotondrafara, Mashrur Chowdhury, Ryann Cartor, Shuhong Gao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02461

Experimental Evaluation of Post-Quantum Homomorphic Encryption for Privacy-Preserving V2X Communication
Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) fundamentally rely on vehicle-generated data for applications such as congestion monitoring and route optimization, making the preservation of user privacy a critical challenge. Homomorphic Encryption (HE) offers a promising solution by enabling computation on encrypted data without revealing underlying content. This study presents the first real-world experimental evaluation of three post-quantum secure HE schemes, i.e., Brakerski-Fan-Vercauteren (BFV),…

Replaced article(s) found for cs.CR. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.CR/new
[1/2]:
- A Homomorphic Encryption Framework for Privacy-Preserving Spiking Neural Networks
Farzad Nikfam, Raffaele Casaburi, Alberto Marchisio, Maurizio Martina, Muhammad Shafique

Unveiling Unicode's Unseen Underpinnings in Undermining Authorship Attribution
Robert Dilworth
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15840 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…

Unveiling Unicode's Unseen Underpinnings in Undermining Authorship Attribution
When using a public communication channel -- whether formal or informal, such as commenting or posting on social media -- end users have no expectation of privacy: they compose a message and broadcast it for the world to see. Even if an end user takes utmost precautions to anonymize their online presence -- using an alias or pseudonym; masking their IP address; spoofing their geolocation; concealing their operating system and user agent; deploying encryption; registering with a disposable phone…

Rethinking HSM and TPM Security in the Cloud: Real-World Attacks and Next-Gen Defenses
Shams Shaikh, Trima P. Fernandes e Fizardo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17655 https://

Rethinking HSM and TPM Security in the Cloud: Real-World Attacks and Next-Gen Defenses
As organizations rapidly migrate to the cloud, the security of cryptographic key management has become a growing concern. Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) and Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs), traditionally seen as the gold standard for securing encryption keys and digital trust, are increasingly challenged by cloud-native threats. Real-world breaches have exposed weaknesses in cloud deployments, including misconfigurations, API abuse, and privilege escalations, allowing attackers to access sens…

EinHops: Einsum Notation for Expressive Homomorphic Operations on RNS-CKKS Tensors
Karthik Garimella, Austin Ebel, Brandon Reagen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07972

EinHops: Einsum Notation for Expressive Homomorphic Operations on RNS-CKKS Tensors
Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is an encryption scheme that allows for computation to be performed directly on encrypted data, effectively closing the loop on secure and outsourced computing. Data is encrypted not only during rest and transit, but also during processing. However, FHE provides a limited instruction set: SIMD addition, SIMD multiplication, and cyclic rotation of 1-D vectors. This restriction makes performing multi-dimensional tensor operations challenging. Practitioners must …

Conditional Cube Attack on Round-Reduced ASCON
Zheng Li, Xiaoyang Dong, Xiaoyun Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15172 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15172

Conditional Cube Attack on Round-Reduced ASCON
This paper evaluates the secure level of authenticated encryption \textsc{Ascon} against cube-like method. \textsc{Ascon} submitted by Dobraunig \emph{et~al.} is one of 16 survivors of the 3rd round CAESAR competition. The cube-like method is first used by Dinur \emph{et~al.} to analyze Keccak keyed modes. At CT-RSA 2015, Dobraunig \emph{et~al.} applied this method to 5/6-round reduced \textsc{Ascon}, whose structure is similar to Keccak keyed modes. However, for \textsc{Ascon} the non-linear l…

DP2Guard: A Lightweight and Byzantine-Robust Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning Scheme for Industrial IoT
Baofu Han, Bing Li, Yining Qi, Raja Jurdak, Kaibin Huang, Chau Yuen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16134

DP2Guard: A Lightweight and Byzantine-Robust Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning Scheme for Industrial IoT
Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning (PPFL) has emerged as a secure distributed Machine Learning (ML) paradigm that aggregates locally trained gradients without exposing raw data. To defend against model poisoning threats, several robustness-enhanced PPFL schemes have been proposed by integrating anomaly detection. Nevertheless, they still face two major challenges: (1) the reliance on heavyweight encryption techniques results in substantial communication and computation overhead; and (2) sing…

Magneto-Ionic Hardware Security Primitives: Embedding Data Protection at the Material Level
Irena Spasojevic, Federica Celegato, Alessandro Magni, Paola Tiberto, Jordi Sort
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14213

Magneto-Ionic Hardware Security Primitives: Embedding Data Protection at the Material Level
The Big Data revolution has heightened the demand for robust, energy-efficient security hardware capable of withstanding increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Conventional encryption schemes, reliant on complex algorithms, are resource-intensive and remain vulnerable. To fortify sensitive information, society needs innovative anti-hacking and anti-counterfeiting technologies that exploit new materials and designs. Here, we present a magneto-ionic strategy for hardware-level security based o…

SECNEURON: Reliable and Flexible Abuse Control in Local LLMs via Hybrid Neuron Encryption
Zhiqiang Wang, Haohua Du, Junyang Wang, Haifeng Sun, Kaiwen Guo, Haikuo Yu, Chao Liu, Xiang-Yang Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05242

SECNEURON: Reliable and Flexible Abuse Control in Local LLMs via Hybrid Neuron Encryption
Large language models (LLMs) with diverse capabilities are increasingly being deployed in local environments, presenting significant security and controllability challenges. These locally deployed LLMs operate outside the direct control of developers, rendering them more susceptible to abuse. Existing mitigation techniques mainly designed for cloud-based LLM services are frequently circumvented or ineffective in deployer-controlled environments. We propose SECNEURON, the first framework that se…

Leuvenshtein: Efficient FHE-based Edit Distance Computation with Single Bootstrap per Cell
Wouter Legiest, Jan-Pieter D'Anvers, Bojan Spasic, Nam-Luc Tran, Ingrid Verbauwhede
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14568

Leuvenshtein: Efficient FHE-based Edit Distance Computation with Single Bootstrap per Cell
This paper presents a novel approach to calculating the Levenshtein (edit) distance within the framework of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), specifically targeting third-generation schemes like TFHE. Edit distance computations are essential in applications across finance and genomics, such as DNA sequence alignment. We introduce an optimised algorithm that significantly reduces the cost of edit distance calculations called Leuvenshtein. This algorithm specifically reduces the number of progr…

FuSeFL: Fully Secure and Scalable Cross-Silo Federated Learning
Sahar Ghoflsaz Ghinani, Elaheh Sadredini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13591 https://

FuSeFL: Fully Secure and Scalable Cross-Silo Federated Learning
Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without centralizing client data, making it attractive for privacy-sensitive domains. While existing approaches employ cryptographic techniques such as homomorphic encryption, differential privacy, or secure multiparty computation to mitigate inference attacks-including model inversion, membership inference, and gradient leakage-they often suffer from high computational, communication, or memory overheads. Moreover, many methods overl…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12911 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCR_…

A Selective Homomorphic Encryption Approach for Faster Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning
Federated learning (FL) has come forward as a critical approach for privacy-preserving machine learning in healthcare, allowing collaborative model training across decentralized medical datasets without exchanging clients' data. However, current security implementations for these systems face a fundamental trade-off: rigorous cryptographic protections like fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) impose prohibitive computational overhead, while lightweight alternatives risk vulnerable data leakage th…

A Non-leveled and Reliable Approximate FHE Framework through Binarized Polynomial Rings
Baigang Chen, Dongfang Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02943 https://

A Non-leveled and Reliable Approximate FHE Framework through Binarized Polynomial Rings
Homomorphic encryption (HE) enables secure computation on encrypted data, safeguarding user privacy in domains such as cloud computing, healthcare, and finance. Among fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) schemes, CKKS is notable for supporting approximate arithmetic over complex numbers, a key requirement for machine-learning and numerical workloads. However, CKKS incurs rapid noise growth, complex parameter tuning, and relies on costly modulus switching. We propose a binary variant of CKKS that …