Sofia Celi
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claucece.bsky.social
Sofia Celi
@claucece.bsky.social
830 followers 340 following 75 posts
Proud LatinAmerican. "Legendary quantum lady/cryptographer". Researcher @brave she/they hrpc co-chair @inretafo anti-fraud @w3c @otr_im @LondonU
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Reposted by Sofia Celi
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
📣 Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU.

Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.
signal.org Signal @signal.org · Oct 3
We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...
signal.org
October 6, 2025 at 6:46 AM
Reposted by Sofia Celi
eerkeboiten.bsky.social
I've signed this too. AI reaching parity with humans next year!? Maybe Altman et al aren't impartial predictors ...
November 10, 2025 at 10:33 AM
Reposted by Sofia Celi
tepski.tech
So excited to be speaking at #MozFest about feminist cyberlaw futures! We’ll be reacting and redacting (!) our way to unlearning cyberlaw narratives. Download our redaction tool here: tepski.tech/feminist!
FEMINIST — Tepski x Tech
Tepski.tech
November 8, 2025 at 10:20 AM
Reposted by Sofia Celi
eff.org
EFF and AV Comparatives team up to see how well anti-virus apps detect Android stalkerware. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...
EFF Teams Up With AV Comparatives to Test Android Stalkerware
EFF has, for many years, raised the alarm about the proliferation of stalkerware—commercially-available apps designed to be installed covertly on another person’s device to exfiltrate data from that
www.eff.org
November 6, 2025 at 7:04 PM
claucece.bsky.social
Happy to have written this new blogpost from Brave Research, based on work at Internet Architecture Board, with Hamed Haddadi and Kyle Den Hartog.

brave.com/blog/zkp-age...

1/3
November 6, 2025 at 3:52 PM
Reposted by Sofia Celi
tek.randhome.io
Grokipedia is racist, transphobic, and loves Elon Musk | The Verge https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/808514/grokipedia-wikipedia-comparison
Grokipedia is racist, transphobic, and loves Elon Musk
xAI’s version of Wikipedia, Grokipedia, frames the world’s history from Elon Musk’s perspective.
www.theverge.com
October 29, 2025 at 1:08 PM
Reposted by Sofia Celi
drugmonkey.bsky.social
Dismantling the Institutional Review Board (IRB), that oversees all human subjects research, is bad. Really bad.
melodyschreiber.com Melody Schreiber @melodyschreiber.com · 27d
The entire HR department at the CDC is gone. Everyone at the IRB, which makes sure studies are conducted ethically and rigorously, and the ethics office, which oversee conflicts of interest for CDC leaders and advisory committee members, were also let go.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
‘Instability and confusion’ as CDC slashes 1,300 jobs before reinstating half
Trump administration says 700 notices were sent in error, while top CDC officer says ‘they didn’t think through what they were doing’
www.theguardian.com
October 19, 2025 at 4:00 PM
Reposted by Sofia Celi
maria.isogeny.club
The Isogeny Club Season 7 starts today! At 5pm CEST, Bruno Sterner will talk about finding large smooth twins from short lattice vectors. More details at isogeny.club
September 23, 2025 at 7:23 AM
Reposted by Sofia Celi
mrsbettybowers.bsky.social
Decrying violence against political opponents rings a bit hollow when you pull Secret Service protection from your political opponents.
September 11, 2025 at 5:16 PM
claucece.bsky.social
Woo!! Coral goes to S&P! eprint.iacr.org/2025/1420 Coral is an amazing system to check over ZKP that a document conforms to a grammar (JSON, C, TOML). Super happy with this work and the amazing work of all the co-authors!
September 9, 2025 at 7:44 PM
Reposted by Sofia Celi
lindsayellis.bsky.social
youtu.be/QwpanShgOp4?...
The Unforgivable Sin of Ms Rachel
YouTube video by Lindsay Ellis
youtu.be
August 26, 2025 at 3:25 PM
Reposted by Sofia Celi
katav.gay
a fantastic video about important topics and with a worthy fundraiser, and best of all it has this amazing moment
August 27, 2025 at 8:10 PM
claucece.bsky.social
Two super nice things this week!! Thank you, AsiaCCS (really happy there are such things as reviewer's awards, as we need good reviews!) and @iacrcrypto.bsky.social !
August 19, 2025 at 12:52 PM
Reposted by Sofia Celi
mccurley.bsky.social
Anyone who has been an IACR member in 2023-2026 should have received a link to respond to a survey about conferences and publishing. So far over 500 people have responded, but it will remain open for responses until Sept 12, 2025. I would also encourage people to use their forum invitations.
International Association for Cryptologic Research
A place to discuss matters related to IACR
discuss.iacr.org
August 14, 2025 at 4:28 AM
Reposted by Sofia Celi
malb.bsky.social
11 Sep UK Crypto Day in Manchester: uk-crypto-day.github.io/2025/09/11/u...

Together with @rikkebjerg.bsky.social I'll be talking about our upcoming work with @bedow.bsky.social and Simone Colombo: At-Compromise Security: The Case for Alert Blindness
Screenshot of https://uk-crypto-day.github.io/2025/09/11/uk-crypto-day/ with text: Rikke Bjerg Jensen & Martin Albrecht: At-Compromise Security: The Case for Alert Blindness We start from the observation (Blanchette’12) that cryptography broadly intuits security goals – as modelled in games or ideal functionalities – while claiming realism. This stands in contrast to cryptography’s attentive approach towards examining assumptions and constructions through cryptanalysis and reductions. To close this gap, we introduce a technique for determining security goals. Given that games and ideal functionalities model specific social relations between various honest and adversarial parties, our approach is grounded in a careful social science methodology for studying social relations in their contexts: ethnography. As a first application of this technique, we study security at-compromise (neither pre- nor post-) and introduce the security goal of alert blindness. Specifically, as observed in our 2024/2025 ethnographic fieldwork with protesters in Kenya, alert blindness captures a security goal of abducted persons who were taken by Kenyan security forces for their presumed activism. It may have applications elsewhere. Joint work with Simone Colombo and Benjamin Dowling. See also: Social Foundations of Cryptography Bios. Rikke Bjerg Jensen is a Professor in the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her work is ethnographic and grounded in explorations of information security practices and needs among groups of people living and working at the margins of societies. Martin Albrecht is a Professor of Cryptography at King’s College London. He works broadly across the field of cryptography but focuses on the analysis of deployed or soon-to-be deployed cryptographic solutions and on analysing the security of lattice-based cryptography against classical and quantum computers.
August 13, 2025 at 11:21 AM
Reposted by Sofia Celi
mkskeller.bsky.social
USENIX chair report: "six individuals appear as co-authors on 20 or more submissions, with two authors appearing on 36 and 39 submissions respectively. At such volume, it becomes difficult not to question the nature and depth of the contributions" www.usenix.org/sites/defaul...
www.usenix.org
August 13, 2025 at 8:47 AM
Reposted by Sofia Celi
dfaranha.bsky.social
I just learned that Claus Schnorr passed away last June, aged 81 — a significant loss for the cryptographic community: mittelhessen-gedenkt.de/traueranzeig...
Traueranzeigen von Claus Peter Schnorr | mittelhessen-gedenkt.de
Besuchen Sie die Gedenkseite von Claus Peter Schnorr. Lesen Sie die Traueranzeige und gedenken Sie des Verstorbenen mit einer Kerze oder Kondolenz.
mittelhessen-gedenkt.de
July 31, 2025 at 8:30 AM
Reposted by Sofia Celi
fightforthefuture.org
BREAKING: New investigation exposes Microsoft for enabling surveillance + killing of Palestinians.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...
‘A million calls an hour’: Israel relying on Microsoft cloud for expansive surveillance of Palestinians
Revealed: The Israeli military undertook an ambitious project to store a giant trove of Palestinians’ phone calls on Microsoft’s servers in Europe
www.theguardian.com
August 7, 2025 at 2:19 PM
Reposted by Sofia Celi
aclu.org
We sent a letter to all superintendents in Arkansas warning them not to display the Ten Commandments in schools after a federal judge this week ruled that a state law requiring the displays is “obviously unconstitutional.”

Every school district has an obligation to abide by the First Amendment.
August 6, 2025 at 4:21 PM
claucece.bsky.social
Proud of this work, and of the amazing work of Eli!
eprint.ing.bot ePrint Updates @eprint.ing.bot · Aug 5
Coral: Fast Succinct Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge CFG Proofs (Sebastian Angel, Sofía Celi, Elizabeth Margolin, Pratyush Mishra, Martin Sander, Jess Woods) ia.cr/2025/1420
Abstract. We introduce Coral, a system for proving in zero- knowledge that a committed byte stream corresponds to a structured object in accordance to a Context Free Grammar. Once a prover establishes the validity of the parsed object with Coral, they can selectively prove facts about the object—such as fields in Web API responses or in JSON Web Tokens—–to third parties or blockchains. Coral reduces the problem of correct parsing to a few simple checks over a left-child right-sibling tree and introduces a novel segmented memory abstraction that unifies and extends prior constructions for RAM in zkSNARKs. Our implementation of Coral runs on a standard laptop, and non-interactively proves the parsing of real Web responses (JSON) and files (TOML and C) in seconds. The resulting proofs are small and cheap to verify.
August 5, 2025 at 12:10 AM
Reposted by Sofia Celi
komadori.bsky.social
Just as it did with the Apple "backdoor" demand, the UK Government has got itself into a ridiculous mess over age estimation and VPNs. Here's a Govt spokesperson saying that young users must not be encouraged to use VPNs. 1/n
July 31, 2025 at 10:22 AM
Reposted by Sofia Celi
khanhcrypto.bsky.social
Together with Ky Nguyen, we're organising the Young Cryptographers Forum 2025 in Hanoi, Vietnam! Two days (24-25.08) of awesome crypto talks. Check it out! (Registration deadline for stipends is coming up)
viasm.edu.vn/hdkh/YCF2025
Young Cryptographers Forum-Viện nghiên cứu cao cấp về toán
viasm.edu.vn
July 16, 2025 at 10:26 AM
Reposted by Sofia Celi
irtf.org
At IETF-123 next week, the IRTF's HRPC research group will host talks about the constraints and considerations of legal frameworks in armed conflict, about censorship in Iran, and a talk by Maria Farrell, author of "We Need to Rewild the Internet.
datatracker.ietf.org/doc/agenda-1...
Agenda IETF123: hrpc
datatracker.ietf.org
July 14, 2025 at 1:46 PM
Reposted by Sofia Celi
krijn.isogeni.es
Single author, fifteen pages, reduces the bit complexity of millenia-old UOV instances!!
eprint.ing.bot ePrint Updates @eprint.ing.bot · Jun 19
Wedges, oil, and vinegar – An analysis of UOV in characteristic 2 (Lars Ran) ia.cr/2025/1143
Abstract. The Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar construction (UOV) has been the backbone of multivariate cryptography since the fall of HFE-based schemes. In fact, 7 UOV-based schemes have been submitted to the NIST additional call for signatures, and 4 of these made it to the second round. For efficiency considerations, most of these schemes are defined over a field of characteristic 2. This has as a side effect that the polar forms of the UOV public maps are not only symmetric, but also alternating. In this work, we propose a new key-recovery attack on UOV in characteristic 2 that makes use of this property. We consider the polar forms of the UOV public maps as elements of the exterior algebra. We show that these are contained in a certain subspace of the second exterior power that is dependent on the oil space. This allows us to define relations between the polar forms and the image of the dual of the oil space under the Plücker embedding. With this, we can recover the secret oil space using sparse linear algebra. This new attack has an improved complexity over previous methods and reduces the security by 4, 11, and 20 bits for uov-Ip, uov-III, and uov-V, respectively. Furthermore, the attack is applicable to MAYO₂ and improves on the best attack by 28 bits. Image showing part 2 of abstract.
June 19, 2025 at 12:39 PM
Reposted by Sofia Celi
vanhoefm.bsky.social
Yikes. Turns out you can send a plaintext radio signal to cause any train in the USA to do an emergency break. The original 'security' was just a checksum, no encryption or authentication. Reporting this took them 12 years (!) because the vendor dismissed it initially www.cisa.gov/news-events/...
End-of-Train and Head-of-Train Remote Linking Protocol | CISA
www.cisa.gov
July 12, 2025 at 12:14 PM