Hacker News with Generative AI: Cryptography

Markovian Parallax Denigrate (wikipedia.org)
Markovian Parallax Denigrate is a series[1] of hundreds of messages[2] posted to Usenet in 1996.[3] The messages, which appear to be gibberish, were all posted with the subject line "Markovian parallax denigrate".
WireGuard vanity keygen (github.com/axllent)
A command-line vanity (public) key generator for WireGuard. By default, it only matches the prefix of generated public keys, and not whether the search matches anywhere in the public key. The concept is based on wireguard-vanity-address, however I wanted something a little more streamlined.
Go Cryptography Security Audit (go.dev)
Google recently contracted the independent security firm Trail of Bits to complete an audit of the core set of packages that are also validated as part of the new native FIPS 140-3 module.
How the ClientAuth Crackdown Is Pushing Finance Toward X9 PKI (digicert.com)
Browser vendors are drawing a clear line in the sand: As of June 15, 2026, public TLS server certificates must no longer include the Client Authentication EKU.
Ask HN: How do you store private keys? (ycombinator.com)
It seems there is no standard proper way to store private keys.
In Memoriam: John L. Young, Cryptome Co-Founder (eff.org)
John L. Young, who died March 28 at age 89 in New York City, was among the first people to see the need for an online library of official secrets, a place where the public could find out things that governments and corporations didn’t want them to know.
Forget IPs: using cryptography to verify bot and agent traffic (cloudflare.com)
With the rise of traffic from AI agents, what’s considered a bot is no longer clear-cut.
Ending TLS Client Authentication Certificate Support in 2026 (letsencrypt.org)
Let’s Encrypt will no longer include the “TLS Client Authentication” Extended Key Usage (EKU) in our certificates beginning in 2026.
The cryptography behind passkeys (trailofbits.com)
When most people think of cryptography, the first thing they typically think of is encryption: keeping information confidential. But just as important (if not more) is authenticity: ensuring that information is really coming from an authentic source.
A first successful factorization of RSA-2048 integer by D-Wave quantum computer (sciopen.com)
This marks the first successful factorization of RSA-2048 by D-Wave quantum computer, regardless of employing mathematical or quantum techniques, despite dealing with special integers, exceeding 21061−1 of California State University.
GNU Taler 1.0 Released (taler.net)
We are happy to announce the release of GNU Taler v1.0.
Sunlight: A certificate transparency implementation built for scalability, ease (letsencrypt.org)
Let’s Encrypt is proud to introduce Sunlight, a new implementation of a Certificate Transparency log that we built from the ground up with modern Web PKI opportunities and constraints in mind.
The Linux Kernel's PGP Web of Trust (kleine-koenig.org)
The Linux kernel's development process makes use of PGP. The most relevant part here is that subsystem maintainers are supposed to use signed tags in their pull requests to Linus Torvalds. As the concept of keyservers is considered broken, Konstantin Ryabitsev maintains a collection of relevant keys in a git repository.
Today's AI can crack second world war Enigma code 'in short order', experts say (theguardian.com)
The Enigma code was a fiendish cipher that took Alan Turing and his fellow codebreakers a herculean effort to crack. Yet experts say it would have crumbled in the face of modern computing.
Rich Schroepell responds to Ron Rivest and the RSA MIT algorithm (1977) (archive.org)
TIL Alice and Bob were almost Adolf and Bertholdt. Rich Schroepell responds to Ron Rivest and the RSA paper in 1977 and suggests naming the protagonists Adolf and Bertholdt. Rivest, Shamir and Adleman eventually used Alice and Bob, but the suggestion came from Schroepell originally.
EP-3E Collision: Cryptologic Damage Assessment and Incident Review (2001) [pdf] (archive.org)
Show HN: Cryptle – Wordle for Cryptogrphy (cryptle.site)
One puzzle per day. New puzzle available at midnight.
RSA cofounder: The world would've been better without cryptocurrencies (theregister.com)
RSA cofounder: The world would've been better without cryptocurrencies
Google Wallet integrates zero-knowledge proofs for identity (google)
Today we're introducing updates that help you prove your age and identity in a safe and secure way, right from your phone.
What the heck is AEAD again? (ochagavia.nl)
Here’s a problem you might be familiar with: I keep forgetting what AEAD exactly means and why you would ever use it. Yes, I know the acronym stands for “Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data”, but does that really clarify anything? Not to me, so I’ve finally decided to sit down and write this blog post as a piece of help for my future self… and for anyone else who finds AEAD hard to retain.
AES-128 Plaintext Recovery in Nordic Semiconductor NRF52840 SoC (bedri-zija.github.io)
Quantum Messages Cross Germany Using Conventional Fiber (ieee.org)
Researchers have developed a quantum cryptography system that can transmit secure messages over more than 250 kilometers—here, from the German cities of Frankfurt to Kehl, with a relay node in Kirchfeld.
Hello users of Anubis (for fighting malicious bots), I created an alternative (github.com/Zirias)
The pow credentials checker is a special case: It provides a guest login with fixed username and password, but for using it, it requires the client's browser to solve a cryptographic puzzle.
Offical XRP NPM package has been compromised and key stealing malware introduced (aikido.dev)
At 21 Apr, 20:53 GMT+0, our system, Aikido Intel started to alert us to five new package version of the xrpl package. It is the official SDK for the XRP Ledger, with more than 140.000 weekly downloads. We quickly confirmed the official XPRL (Ripple) NPM package was compromised by sophisticated attackers who put in a backdoor to steal cryptocurrency private keys and gain access to cryptocurrency wallets.
Show HN: BioLight – Passive entropy engine: raw randomness and 0 post-processing (github.com/Ladaxia)
BioLight is a transparent entropy engine designed to passively accumulate high-quality entropy samples from raw input states.
What the hell is an elliptic curve? (onlynv.dev)
Have you ever been browsing the web and come across a term that made you go, "huh?" Well, if you're even slightly cryptographcally inclined, you might have stumbled upon the term elliptic curve and thought to yourself, "What the hell?" Don't worry, you're not alone in feeling a bit lost.
Syncing Keyhive (inkandswitch.com)
The last few lab notes have focused on the cryptographic components which support a local first access control system. Those being a capability based system for managing write access to documents, and a key agreement protocol for encrypting and decrypting writes (thus implementing read control). We now have to think about how to actually transfer this data between devices.
15,000 lines of verified cryptography now in Python (protzenko.fr)
In November 2022, I opened issue 99108 on Python’s GitHub repository, arguing that after a recent CVE in its implementation of SHA3, Python should embrace verified code for all of its hash-related infrastructure.
A New ASN.1 API for Python (trailofbits.com)
We’re changing that: with the help of funding from Alpha-Omega, we’re building an ASN.1 API for PyCA Cryptography that addresses three key shortcomings in the Python ecosystem today:
Shell-secrets – GPG-encrypted environment variables (github.com/waj)
This is a small tool to set environment variables from encrypted (with GPG) files