Archives August 2026

The paperwork layer

Standfirst: A validated hardware security module, a bill aimed at the electricity grid, and a Finnish research programme pointing at the certificate layer. Three developments in one week say the same thing: the hard part of the post-quantum transition is no longer cryptographic. A fourth — a vendor blog doing the rounds again — is […]

A candidate falls: what Claude found in HAWK

On 28 July, Anthropic published two cryptanalysis results produced with its Claude Mythos Preview model. One improved an attack on a reduced-round variant of AES — theoretically interesting, practically irrelevant, and not our subject here. The other is a genuine problem for HAWK, a post-quantum signature scheme that NIST advanced to a third round of […]