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 […]

Quantum Springtime: Harvest Now, Decrypt Later: A Look into How & Who’s Actually Farming Your Encrypted Data, and Why Most of the Crop Rots

What “harvesting” encrypted data really costs an adversary, what it would take to read the stockpile, and where the actual threat is hiding. This article walks a five-gate framework (physical access, storage economics, decryptability, data shelf life, and adversary motive) from first principles, and grounds it in an original internet-wide scan of what post-quantum cryptography […]

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 […]