Martin R. Albrecht
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malb.bsky.social
Martin R. Albrecht
@malb.bsky.social
840 followers 300 following 99 posts
Cryptography Professor at King's College London and Principal Research Scientist at SandboxAQ. Erdős–Bacon Number: 6. He/him or they/them.

https://malb.io
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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
malb.bsky.social
Here's a previous take on said book from social-foundations-of-cryptography.gitlab.io/2024/06/12/p...
Website excerpt: Here, the authors consider a whistleblower setting which then motivates the definition of ring signatures. Thus, a ring signature claims to be at least also a formalisation of the social setting in which a member of a group wishes to alert outsides to something without revealing themselves while still convincing the outsider that they have access to the information being leaked. Put differently, cryptography presumes and models social relations. As such, cryptography is also a social science. However, cryptography is unaware of itself as a social science and we cryptographers more or less speculatively make up the social settings we model in our paper’s introductions. I highly recommend Jean-François Blanchette’s “Burdens of Proof: Cryptographic Culture and Evidence Law in the Age of Electronic Documents” for a deeper dive into this observation. This begs the question if cryptography gets that part of its models right? In general, we work hard to have precise definitions and definitional work is a central activity of cryptography. Yet, the correctness of this part of the definitional work is usually simply presumed: “On these questions, the literature remains silent” as Blanchette put it.
April 15, 2025 at 7:14 PM
malb.bsky.social
This long read is quite something: www.npr.org/2025/04/15/n...
Article extract: From what he could see, the data leaving, almost all text files, added up to around 10 gigabytes — or the equivalent of a full stack of encyclopedias if someone printed them, he explained. It's a sizable chunk of the total data in the NLRB system, though the agency itself hosts over 10 terabytes in historical data. It's unclear which files were copied and removed or whether they were consolidated and compressed, which could mean even more data was exfiltrated. It's also possible that DOGE ran queries looking for specific files in the NLRB's system and took only what it was looking for, according to the disclosure. Article extract: It houses information about ongoing contested labor cases, lists of union activists, internal case notes, personal information from Social Security numbers to home addresses, proprietary corporate data and more information that never gets published openly.
April 15, 2025 at 7:01 PM
malb.bsky.social
On digital currencies and the great power conflict between the US and the EU: "The battle for the global payments system is under way" www.ft.com/content/40f6...

(I know the FT is paywalled, sorry about that!)
An excerpt from the linked FT piece that reads: "So the fight for domination of the future payments system is on — and the US wants to win. The broader European public may be blissfully unaware. But those in charge of the Eurozone are also determined that this battle for technological control over the economy is one that the EU must not lose. This is the fundamental motivation for the digital euro — a central bank-issued official digital currency that, if done well and fast enough, will rival or outperform the attractiveness of dollar stablecoins."
April 6, 2025 at 11:18 AM
malb.bsky.social
Update on crypto.iacr.org/2025/
Given recent instances of US visa holders and residents being detained or deported by US immigration authorities, we understand that some members of our community may not feel safe traveling to the US for Crypto this year. We want to assure everyone that we will provide the option to present and attend remotely.
March 21, 2025 at 7:26 PM
malb.bsky.social
Together with @kennyog.bsky.social we're organising a meeting at Eurocrypt to discuss how the, let's say, "dramatically changing political landscape" affects cryptography and our community, both domestically in some countries but also internationally eurocrypt.iacr.org/2025/communi...
Wednesday, May 7, 14:30-16:00 (Room TBD): Cryptography in a Changing World: Navigating Geopolitical Uncertainty and Security Risks Join us to discuss what we as a community can and should do in light of a dramatically changing political landscape, both domestically for some of us and internationally for all of us. We don't have ideas to pitch to you, but we think it will be useful to meet and to start a discussion. For more information: Martin Albrecht and Kenny Paterson.
March 11, 2025 at 9:53 AM
malb.bsky.social
Rerandomising LWE martinralbrecht.wordpress.com/2025/03/01/r...
Drake No: A(s,e) + A(t,d) Drake Yes: UAO
March 1, 2025 at 12:58 PM
malb.bsky.social
Algorand be like: DOGE, love what you're doing with the US Government, would love to help.

www.mitrade.com/insights/new...

x.com/AlgoFoundati...
February 6, 2025 at 2:50 PM
malb.bsky.social
Yup yup yup! Friends don't let friends disclosure through HackerOne et al eprint.iacr.org/2024/532
A worrying trend in this area is that vendors “outsource” this process to “bug bounty” service providers. These services are based around the idea of vulnerability disclosure being financially rewarded, often in return for some form of agreement on non-disclosure. This process is unsuited to the activities considered here; both with regard to their motivation – improving security independently of financial reward – and with regard to their content – cryptographic vulnerabilities are rarely disclosed and thus the industry around vulnerability disclosures and bug bounties is inexperienced in dealing with them. We recommend avoiding any intermediaries in the disclosure process, since they may impose their own policies with negative consequences. For example, our disclosure of the previously mentioned plaintext recovery attack against (Open)SSH  was hampered by us going via the UK’s Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure, resulting in the following notification on the OpenSSH project webpages: The OpenSSH team has been made aware of an attack against the SSH protocol version 2 by researchers at the University of London. Unfortunately, due to the report lacking any detailed technical description of the attack and CPNI’s unwillingness to share necessary information, we are unable to properly assess its impact.[1] [1] See https://www.openssh.com/txt/cbc.adv.
January 16, 2025 at 11:26 AM
malb.bsky.social
We got a PhD Position in Lattice-Based Cryptography at King's College London

martinralbrecht.wordpress.com/2024/11/29/p...

cryptographers.kcl.ac.uk
November 29, 2024 at 8:39 PM
malb.bsky.social
Reminder, you must register your Real World Crypto 2025 submission by Friday AoE to have it considered, but you can finalise it until Monday (not AoE!), see submit.iacr.org/rwc2025/dead... We hear there's a competing S&P deadline and we're nice like that.
November 12, 2024 at 11:07 AM
malb.bsky.social
March 24, 2024 at 4:05 PM
malb.bsky.social
December 16, 2023 at 12:29 PM
malb.bsky.social
Our work - with Ben Dowling and Dan Jones - formally analysing @matrix.org is out on eprint: eprint.iacr.org/2023/1300

Here is my attempt to summarise our interpretation: martinralbrecht.wordpress.com/2023/09/02/a...
September 2, 2023 at 9:20 AM
malb.bsky.social
68 (UK affiliated) researchers working on security and privacy have raised alarms about provisions in the UK #OnlineSafetyBill: "our concern is that surveillance technologies are deployed in the spirit of providing online safety."

Read our letter here: https://haddadi.github.io/UKOSBOpenletter.pdf
July 5, 2023 at 11:34 AM