Cryptography & Security News

This article provides a technical correction to FIPS-204's estimated loop iterations for ML-DSA signing. It clarifies that the standard's Table 1 accounts for only one of two rejection points in the signing loop, with the second rejection arising from public-key compression. The correction results in a 1-2% change in expected iterations but does not affect security. The article derives the precise conditional acceptance probability model and distinguishes between security-related and compression-related rejection conditions.

NIST SP 800-185 Rev. 1 specifies four SHA-3-derived cryptographic functions (cSHAKE, KMAC, TupleHash, and ParallelHash) for 128- and 256-bit security levels. The revision introduces a new streaming interface (INIT, ABSORB, SQUEEZE) enabling incremental processing of input and output without requiring advance knowledge of total lengths, while maintaining backward compatibility with single-call interfaces from the previous version.

Apple Reference Image is an opt-in iPhone camera feature that creates securely timestamped reference images to prove photos reflect what the sensor captured. It uses hardware protection, Private Cloud Compute for private processing, and post-quantum cryptographic protections (RSA-3072 and ML-DSA-87) to ensure long-term integrity against quantum attacks while protecting photographer privacy.

Let's Encrypt will transition from 90-day to 64-day certificate lifetimes by default starting February 10, 2027, with options for 45-day or 6-day certificates. The authorization reuse period will be reduced from 30 days to 10 days immediately, and further to seven hours in 2028. Staging begins October 14, 2026 for testing. Organizations should automate certificate renewal processes and update renewal schedules accordingly.

A draft specification defining two composite post-quantum signature schemes for SSH that combine ML-DSA with traditional Ed25519 or ECDSA (P-384) signatures. The schemes use identifiers ssh-mldsa44-ed25519 and ssh-mldsa87-p384, with keys and signatures constructed as concatenations following a composite signature framework. Signatures incorporate a message representative with fixed prefix, domain-separation label, context string, and SHA-512 hash of the message.

Chrome describes its response to DNS hijacks of .gh, .sl, and .as ccTLDs where attackers obtained unauthorized HTTPS certificates for Google domains and others. Chrome blocked the certificates via CRLSets and worked with CAs for revocation. The article recommends domain owners monitor Certificate Transparency logs, publish restrictive CAA records, and implement ACME account bindings to limit certificate issuance after DNS restoration.

MIKE (Module Isogeny Key-Exchange) is a post-quantum non-interactive key exchange mechanism based on isogeny cryptography, offering the smallest public and secret keys among PQ KEMs. It provides two parameter sets (Fast and Rigorous) across NIST security levels I, III, and V, with implementations in C, Rust, and Python/SageMath.

DNS-PERSIST-01, a proposed ACME domain validation method that would use a persistent DNS TXT record to authorize a CA account for all subdomains and wildcards, has been delayed from Q2 2026 to mid-2027. The project evolved through Apple's certificate lifetime initiatives and IETF standardization, but faced security and privacy concerns with early designs. A revised hash-based approach was published in September to address these issues while maintaining DNS-01 security properties, though standardization and integration efforts continue to cause delays.

SEC Consult researchers discovered email spoofing vulnerabilities in Apple iCloud that allow attackers to spoof arbitrary iCloud sender addresses. The vulnerabilities exploit header smuggling and parsing discrepancies in iCloud's SMTP workflow, where differences between two parsing stages enable attackers to craft messages with multiple From headers or specially crafted headers that bypass parser checks, resulting in recipients seeing spoofed iCloud addresses as senders.

The article demonstrates a security vulnerability in C2PA (Content Credentialing for Pan-Organized Architecture) where large byte-range exclusions in signatures allow attackers to modify content after signing while maintaining valid signatures and timestamps. This enables post-signature tampering of files like images without breaking verification, and current tools don't flag this as problematic. The author advocates for stricter, format-specific exclusion rules and verifier enforcement.

The NSA has announced new post-quantum cryptography measures to protect National Security Systems from quantum threats, aligned with Executive Order 14412. Beginning in 2027, all new commercial NSS must support quantum-resistant algorithms, with legacy systems unable to do so phased out by 2030. The NSA is collaborating with academia and industry to develop standards and resources for transitioning to quantum-resistant cryptography, with support provided to the Department of Defense, NSS, and the Defense Industrial Base.

A GitHub repository demonstrating an end-to-end Merkle Tree Certificates (MTC) ecosystem for TLS trust anchoring. It implements a complete PKI infrastructure including a CA with issuance log, cosigning mirror, ACME subscriber, and relying-party update service. The demo follows IETF draft specifications and uses landmark-based certificates with minimal proofs to enable TLS trust without inline signatures, providing a self-contained test environment with OpenSSL integration.

Trail of Bits introduces SequenceHash, a hash-agnostic multihashing construction that works with any secure hash function (SHA-256/384/512, BLAKE, RIPEMD, etc.) to prevent ambiguous input encodings. It provides length-extension protection through double-hashing, supports optional customization strings for context-binding, and includes SequenceMAC as a keyed variant. The construction is simpler than NIST TupleHash while offering equivalent security protections, with implementations in Rust, Go, and Python.

Cloudflare announces its OHTTP Gateway, a managed service that implements Oblivious HTTP (OHTTP) to hide user IP addresses from application backends. The gateway works with relays to distribute trust, allowing requests to be processed without revealing user identities. Cloudflare offers two deployment options: using Cloudflare's relay with a self-hosted gateway, or using Cloudflare's managed gateway with third-party relays.

The German BSI has issued an advisory against using Classic McEliece for new cryptographic projects due to recent cryptanalysis progress, though no practical attacks currently exist against the parameter sets in TR-02102-1. The agency is monitoring ongoing developments in this post-quantum cryptography scheme.

The PKI Consortium released PKI Maturity Model 2.0.0, a vendor-neutral framework for assessing PKI implementations. Key updates include a new Cryptography category covering algorithms, protocols, and crypto agility; expanded certificate validation and inventory requirements including trust anchors; and a free web-based self-assessment tool supporting full requirement-level evaluation.

Cloudflare announces plans to become a public certificate authority, including acquiring an established root from GlobalSign for immediate broad device compatibility, applying for inclusion in major root programs, supporting post-quantum certificates, and implementing ACME-first automation with redundancy to provide a reliable alternative to existing CAs like Let's Encrypt.

Cloudflare announces plans to become a certificate authority supporting Merkle Tree Certificates (MTCs), an IETF PLANTS draft standard that batches certificates into append-only Merkle trees signed by the CA. This approach enables post-quantum secure TLS at scale by using compact inclusion proofs for verification instead of individual certificate validation, addressing the challenge of larger post-quantum signatures. Cloudflare targets early 2027 for Chrome integration and plans to offer MTC issuance at no cost.

German police have adopted a technique called 'messenger monitoring' that accesses messaging app accounts by linking police-controlled devices to suspects' or witnesses' accounts through features like WhatsApp Web and Signal Desktop, without breaking end-to-end encryption. Access is obtained via physical device access or intercepted verification codes, allowing police to read message histories. The practice became formalized around August 2025, though its legality remains contested by privacy advocates.

TLSGatekeeper is a network-based tool that enforces secure TLS configurations at scale by monitoring and validating TLS handshakes against security policies. The authors analyzed over 50 million TLS handshakes against national guidelines, finding widespread use of non-recommended configurations and rapid adoption of post-quantum cryptography options like X25519MLKEM768. The tool addresses the gap between security guidelines and real-world implementations by allowing servers to enforce TLS parameter policies without requiring individual client configuration.

The article discusses a continuum of approaches from quantum error mitigation to fault-tolerant quantum computing, emphasizing hybrid strategies that balance error correction techniques with hardware capabilities. It covers emerging methods achieving 10x lower error rates, conditional fault-tolerant architectures, hierarchical codes, and techniques like post-selected quantum error correction as stepping stones toward universal quantum computation.

Google's PageBreak Project is an internal AI agent initiative that autonomously discovers vulnerabilities in first-party web applications using deterministic validation with real payloads to minimize false positives. The system combines AI-driven vulnerability identification with specialized validators to confirm exploits, forwarding only high-confidence alerts to product teams. As of September 2026, the project found only 2 XSS vulnerabilities across hundreds of apps on high-assurance frameworks, demonstrating effective safe-by-design security practices.

The UK government pressured Apple to provide access to iCloud data protected by Advanced Data Protection (ADP), Apple's strongest end-to-end encryption. After a secret legal order (TCN) sought global access to ADP-protected data, privacy groups challenged the coercion. Rather than create backdoors, Apple withdrew ADP for new UK users in February 2025, reverting to Standard Data Protection that allows law enforcement access. This case illustrates tensions between government surveillance demands and encryption protections.

This document describes Detailed Controls Reports (DCRs) for publicly trusted Certification Authorities issuing TLS server certificates. DCRs enhance transparency by detailing CA operators' systems, processes, and controls that support compliance with TLS Baseline Requirements and related standards. The report combines CA operator documentation with auditor examination results, providing traceable descriptions of control implementation and testing without introducing new audit criteria.

A project evaluating the effectiveness of open-source prompt-injection detectors against realistic attacks embedded in tool outputs. The study finds that most detectors fail to catch buried injections without generating excessive false positives. Best performers like jailbreak-detector-large catch only ~51% of attacks with ~2% false positives, while others like Meta's Prompt Guard 2 perform poorly (~1% detection). The research identifies three failure modes: unrecognized wording, loss of effectiveness in contextualized outputs, and overly aggressive blocking of benign traffic. The evaluation uses 629 realistic AgentDojo attacks embedded in tool output plus 97 benign cases.