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 […]

Everyone else just set a date

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 […]

Quantum-Safe 6G: the protocol bill, and the photons coming up behind it

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, […]

We submitted to the DPMC critical infrastructure consultation — here’s what we said

Today, on the closing day of the consultation, we submitted our formal response to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s Discussion Document on enhancing the cyber security of New Zealand’s critical infrastructure system. Our submission focuses on a gap we identified across all three published consultation documents: there is no substantive mention of […]