All posts by Simon McCorkindale

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 […]

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 […]

Three weeks in June and July produced hard US deadlines for post-quantum cryptography, a blunt statement from the US military about which quantum-safe technologies don’t count, and a machine-checked paper on what it actually costs to break RSA-2048 and P-256. New Zealand remains the only Five Eyes member with no migration deadline at all. For […]

Our read of a sweeping new survey of quantum computing and security keeps circling back to one under-addressed problem. Two specialist papers from the same week show why getting your organisation quantum-safe is becoming harder, not easier. Three papers landed on arXiv in the space of a fortnight in late May and early June, and […]

On 2 June 2026 we re-ran our post-quantum cryptography (PQC) readiness scanner against the same 118 New Zealand critical infrastructure entities we assessed on 14 April 2026. Seven weeks is a short interval for a cryptographic migration story — and the headline number reflects that: the overall PQC rate moved from 52.6% to 52.2%, essentially […]

Three papers published in the second week of May 2026 cover different parts of the post-quantum migration stack: a new NIST report on the next generation of digital signature candidates, a proof-of-concept PQC deployment inside a production bank, and a working FN-DSA implementation on Raspberry Pi hardware. Read together, they deliver the same message from […]

6G standardisation is still years away, but the cryptographic choices that will shape it are being made now. Every Five Eyes PQC migration deadline falls before the first commercial 6G radios are expected. A new paper from Toshiba’s Bristol research lab benchmarks how the NIST-standardised primitives behave on actual telecom-relevant hardware — desktop-class, ARM-class edge, […]

A new arXiv preprint runs the numbers on something every Australian bank — and by extension every NZ subsidiary of one — should already have answered: can post-quantum signatures actually run inside a real-time payments SLA? Reference: arXiv 2605.02276v1, 4 May 2026. The simulation covers Australia’s real-time retail payments rail at production volume — 5.2 […]

A new arXiv preprint from Chou and Cao (UIUC / NCSA) puts numbers on the network cost of PQC certificate bloat. The headline: TTFB doesn’t degrade smoothly as chains grow — it steps up at two specific points where chain size breaches TCP’s flight windows. Reference: arXiv 2604.24869v1, 27 April 2026. The cliffs The first […]

Good news: nobody has a cryptographically relevant quantum computer yet. Shor’s against RSA-2048 still wants more error-corrected qubits than anyone has shipped, and the public roadmaps remain firmly in “soon” territory. Pop the champagne — your AES-256 backups are safe. For now. The “for now” is doing the heavy lifting, of course, which is why […]