cryptography

The G7 Cybersecurity Working Group stated in its latest report that quantum computing poses security threats to both public and private institutions, as well as economic threats, and relevant organizations should begin migrating to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) immediately. The working group noted that the migration process could take several years, and attackers can currently collect and store encrypted data to decrypt it once sufficiently powerful quantum computers become available.Quantum computing may also break digital signatures, leading to identity theft and exposing businesses and their supply chains. The report did not mention cryptocurrencies, but similar public key cryptography is used for blockchain wallets and transaction authorizations. Currently, quantum computers are unable to break Bitcoin's cryptography, but developers are considering post-quantum solutions such as BIP-360. Ethereum researchers plan to replace several cryptographic components used by accounts, validators, and applications. The Solana Foundation has tested post-quantum signatures on its testnet and launched an optional hash-based vault. The G7 working group also urged governments to support relevant research, public-private collaboration, and national PQC strategies.

The Zcash full node client team, Zakura, has released Zakura Common, a set of cryptographic and protocol libraries for the Zcash ecosystem. Official benchmarks show that the proof generation speed on mobile has increased by over 14 times (over 5 times on desktop), Sinsemilla hash speed has increased by over 21 times, decryption trial speed has increased by over 1.5 times, and zk-SNARK verification speed has increased by 4 to 8 times; in many cases, the waiting time for wallet transaction creation can be reduced from over 3 seconds to under 200 milliseconds.This upgrade does not require a network upgrade and has been open-sourced under the MIT/Apache 2.0 dual license. Zakura 1.3.0 will switch to this technology stack.

According to CoinDesk, Ethereum researchers have proposed rebuilding the validator deposit contract to support a new cryptographic system and ultimately stop accepting deposits protected by the existing BLS signatures. This proposal targets the deposit contract, aiming to add a switch that prevents the network from accepting the currently relied-upon signature format.Currently, the contract only accepts BLS keys because their exact size is hardcoded, while the new draft allows for different key sizes, with each deposit tagged by the cryptographic system used, where BLS receives a tag of zero, reserving space for future schemes.If the proposal is approved, it will initially operate with BLS deposits, while other schemes can be registered simultaneously. Future decisions may permanently disable new BLS deposits, at which point validators who have staked using BLS keys will not disappear, but new validators will not be able to join using this method. Ethereum will ultimately need to change separately to inform validators how to check new signatures. This is part of the migration for validators, while another part is already in progress—EIP-8141 framework transaction proposals will allow regular Ethereum accounts to change the cryptographic method for approving transactions without changing their address.The urgency stems from research released in March by Google's Quantum AI research department, which outlined five quantum attack paths against Ethereum, putting over $100 billion in assets at potential risk. The Ethereum Foundation is advancing core protocol changes with a target around 2029. Currently, the amount of ETH staked in Ethereum is approximately 42.4 million, valued at about $10.4 billion.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a new article titled "Obfuscation (Part 3): Local Mixing," which delves into a cryptographic obfuscation technique being explored—"Local Mixing." He claims it may become a new foundational cryptographic tool following elliptic curves, RSA, and lattice-based cryptography.Vitalik states that current mainstream obfuscation techniques mainly rely on complex mathematical assumptions, often resulting in extremely high computational overhead. In contrast, Local Mixing adopts a completely different approach, not relying on elliptic curves, large integer factorization, or lattice cryptography. Instead, it draws on experiences from symmetric cryptography and hash function design, continuously shuffling, reconstructing, and hiding circuit structures to eliminate information leakage while maintaining functionality.The Local Mixing technique primarily includes steps such as reversibility, hardening, mixing, splitting, crossing walk, and "gadgetization." By introducing random structures into the circuit, rearranging logic gates, and employing nonlinear hiding mechanisms, it makes it difficult for attackers to recover the original computational logic.Vitalik points out that this technology is still in its early stages, with security not yet validated over the long term and facing challenges such as random attacks and linear analysis. However, he believes that Local Mixing represents a completely new path for cryptographic exploration, aiming to construct more efficient indistinguishable obfuscation (iO) schemes.If breakthroughs in Local Mixing technology are achieved, it could lead to new quantum-resistant public key encryption schemes and promote the development of general obfuscation techniques. The field still requires years of cryptanalysis and optimization validation, but AI-assisted research may significantly accelerate this maturation process. Vitalik states that obfuscation technology is seen as the "final frontier" of cryptography because, theoretically, other cryptographic primitives can be constructed based on obfuscation and one-way functions. Local Mixing may not only reduce the costs of traditional obfuscation schemes but could also become an important direction for future cryptographic infrastructure.

Justin Drake posted on the X platform that Ethereum L1 will no longer use the SNARK-friendly hash function Poseidon, which has dominated since 2019, and will instead turn to traditional hash functions such as SHA2 or BLAKE2s.This adjustment is based on advancements in the field of SNARK design, shifting the focus from "SNARK-friendly hashing" to "hash-friendly SNARK." By aligning Boolean operations in traditional hashing with binary field native, the proof performance of traditional hashing in SNARK has reached 1 million per second, with an overhead of about 100 times.Research from Binius and Flock has driven relevant progress. The Ethereum Foundation's post-quantum team is advancing this route, with a roadmap that includes deploying production-level leanVM in 2027, and deploying in the consensus layer, execution layer, and data processing layer in 2028.Justin Drake also stated that the enhanced capabilities of AI in cryptanalysis have recently led to setbacks for the lattice-based scheme HAWK and the homomorphic scheme SQIsign, with hash-based schemes being used for post-quantum signatures on the blockchain. The trend of open-source automated research is also accelerating, with SNARK.fast achieving 1.8 million BLAKE3 proofs per second.

According to official news, OpenAI has released research results stating that its next-generation AI model Astra has made progress in the fields of mathematics and theoretical computer science, involving areas such as high-dimensional geometry, coding theory, group theory, quantum complexity, post-quantum cryptography, and extremal combinatorial mathematics. The 10 published results include: the high-dimensional sphere packing problem, binary and spherical coding problems, non-sofic group problems, Connes rigidity conjecture, arithmetic circuit complexity problems, quantum parallel repetition problems, nearest vector problems, Ehrhart volume conjecture, multi-color Ramsey number problems, and extremal graph theory conjectures.It is reported that these results were derived using an internal version of the Astra model, with the computational cost of finding solutions amounting to approximately $2000 (calculated based on Sol API prices).Subsequently, human researchers used the same model to assist in compiling the results into a paper and generated verifiable proof certificates through the Lean formal proof system.

Anthropic announced that the Claude Mythos Preview model has made breakthroughs in cryptographic research, discovering improved attack methods against the post-quantum digital signature candidate HAWK. HAWK is a post-quantum signature candidate solicited by NIST to combat quantum computer attacks, which has already passed two rounds of expert review. However, Claude reduced the effective key strength of HAWK-256 from 2^64 to 2^38 in just 60 hours, significantly lowering the theoretical cost of cracking. HAWK has not yet been deployed in practice, and this attack currently does not affect any production systems.Claude also discovered an improved attack against 7-round AES, achieving a speed increase of 200 to 800 times. During the research process, Claude independently completed literature reviews, mathematical reasoning, and experimental validation with limited guidance from cryptographers. The HAWK attack took about 60 hours and had an API cost of approximately $100,000; the AES attack was completed independently by Claude, which generated about 1 billion tokens before proposing core innovative ideas. Anthropic researchers then spent hundreds of hours validating the results. Anthropic stated that AI models can now help identify significant flaws in cryptographic algorithms, and the cryptography community may face bottlenecks similar to those in the software vulnerability field—AI-generated research results far exceed human verification capabilities. Anthropic has collaborated with academic institutions to launch the CryptanalysisBench benchmark and coordinated disclosures with NIST authors and government partners. The research team has achieved preliminary results on algorithms such as LEA and Serpent-128. Anthropic warns that as AI capabilities improve, actual attacks against deployed systems may be discovered in the future, necessitating the establishment of response mechanisms in advance.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a new article introducing a novel cryptographic obfuscation technology called Diamond iO. This technology aims to address the extremely low efficiency of traditional indistinguishable obfuscation schemes, allowing programs to run while hiding internal logic and critical data. Although traditional iO technology possesses strong privacy protection capabilities, its operational costs are prohibitively high, making it nearly impractical. Diamond iO, by adopting more aggressive new cryptographic assumptions, enhances computational efficiency from "universe-level time consumption" to "planet-level time consumption," bringing it closer to practical application.Diamond iO is built on technologies such as Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). By encrypting programs, it allows users to execute the encrypted programs and obtain correct outputs without being able to view the internal code or hidden keys. This solution introduces a new input encoding mechanism and conditional decryption method, reducing computational complexity while ensuring the program logic remains hidden. Its core application scenarios include protecting programs that contain private keys, enabling secure software licensing, constructing trustless cryptographic services, and supporting blockchain and artificial intelligence systems with stronger privacy protection.However, Diamond iO is still in the early research stage, and its security relies on new cryptographic assumptions, including All-Product LWE and Evasive LWE, which require further research validation. At the same time, the technology still faces efficiency challenges such as high computational overhead and circuit depth limitations. Researchers believe that by optimizing underlying hash functions, improving homomorphic encryption schemes, and reducing security parameter requirements, Diamond iO is expected to become an important direction for advancing practical program obfuscation technology in the future.

According to PR Newswire, QIZ Security announced the completion of a $17 million seed round financing, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Merlin Ventures, with participation from Evolution Equity Partners, Qbeat Ventures, Singtel Innov8, Qino Cyber Capital, and others.The company positions itself as a management platform for crypto assets and post-quantum cryptography (PQC), providing continuous crypto asset discovery, risk modeling, and governance, helping large clients in finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and critical infrastructure achieve "crypto agility" to address the risk of "Q-Day," when quantum computing capable of breaking existing encryption systems may emerge as early as 2029, and collaborates with Cisco, AWS, Google, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, EY, IBM, and others to promote enterprise quantum security migration planning.

On May 14, BNB Chain released the "BSC Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration Report," stating that it has completed the migration testing for quantum-resistant cryptography for transaction signatures and the consensus layer, using the NIST standardized post-quantum signature algorithm ML-DSA-44 (Dilithium) and the pqSTARK aggregation scheme.The report shows that BSC has replaced transaction signatures from ECDSA to ML-DSA-44 and switched consensus voting aggregation from BLS12-381 to pqSTARK to address the potential threats posed by future quantum computing to the existing elliptic curve cryptography system. However, post-quantum signatures also significantly increase the on-chain data volume: the size of a single transaction has increased from about 110 bytes to approximately 2.5KB; the block size in a 2000 TPS scenario has increased from about 130KB to around 2MB; and the TPS in the testing environment has decreased by about 40%-50%.BSC stated that the current network bottleneck mainly comes from the larger transaction data propagation, rather than the consensus protocol itself. Meanwhile, the consensus layer aggregation still maintains high efficiency, with pqSTARK achieving a signature compression ratio of about 43:1, and the additional burden on validators remains within a controllable range. The report concludes that existing technology can achieve "quantum-resistant" deployment for blockchain, but future issues related to network bandwidth and data scalability still need to be addressed.

NEAR Protocol stated on platform X that the team is adding post-quantum cryptography support for the network. NEAR's account model is different from Bitcoin and Ethereum; accounts are decoupled from cryptography and controlled through rotatable access keys.The NEAR One team is adding the NIST-approved lattice-based signature FIPS-204 scheme as the first post-quantum signature option. Once launched, any NEAR account holder can rotate keys through a single transaction, achieving quantum safety. NEAR is also collaborating with software and hardware wallets to advance post-quantum support.Through the chain signature feature, NEAR can provide threshold signatures for over 35 chains. The NEAR Intents team is developing a quantum-safe cross-chain signature solution. If other chains progress slowly in adopting post-quantum cryptography, NEAR can offer a quantum-safe environment. Aspects such as consensus mechanisms, validators, block synchronization, and transaction signatures also need to evolve for the post-quantum era, with the goal of achieving a one-time future-compatible migration.

According to The Block, quantum security startup Project Eleven released a report stating that the "Q-Day," when quantum computers could break modern encryption technology, may arrive as early as 2030, with a probability of occurring before 2033 "likely exceeding 50%." The report warns that the enhancement of quantum computing capabilities will not be a linear progression but rather a leap "from nothing to something, triggered at once." Currently, approximately 6.9 million BTC (worth over $56 billion) are at risk of quantum attacks under certain conditions.In response to the aforementioned threat, several solutions have emerged in the industry: Paradigm researcher Dan Robinson proposed using timestamp proofs to help holders recover assets on future quantum-safe versions of the Bitcoin network; the BIP-361 proposal by Jameson Lopp and others suggests establishing a multi-year migration window to guide users in transferring funds to quantum-resistant addresses. Google has also advanced its quantum-resistant encryption migration target to 2029.

Grayscale stated that although advanced quantum computing poses a long-term potential threat to traditional cryptography and supports all mainstream blockchains in accelerating quantum-resistant upgrades, this is not the main driver behind the recent decline in Bitcoin prices.Grayscale observed that in recent months, Bitcoin has shown a synchronized trend with the stock prices of publicly traded companies focused on quantum computing. If quantum computing breakthroughs were to exert substantial pressure on Bitcoin, the stock prices of quantum computing companies should rise, but the opposite has actually occurred. Furthermore, since October of last year, the decline in Bitcoin and quantum computing stocks mainly reflects the overall derisking of growth assets triggered by market concerns over the impact of AI.Although Bitcoin's recent correlation with investor sentiment in cutting-edge technology assets like quantum computing has increased, this has not changed its value storage function in a diversified portfolio. Investors do not need to wait for blockchain to fully complete quantum-resistant upgrades to gain relevant exposure.

According to the Korea Economic Daily, the South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb has announced that it will introduce post-quantum cryptography (PQC) technology to guard against the risk of future quantum computers potentially breaking existing encryption systems.Bithumb plans to comprehensively apply PQC technology from virtual asset wallet management to identity authentication systems, focusing on protecting customer private keys, and will collaborate with security technology company ATON to encrypt various stages of data processing, including input, authentication, transmission, and storage. Additionally, Bithumb will strengthen its real-time monitoring system to detect new types of hacker attacks and abnormal trading patterns that utilize quantum computers.

The Ethereum Foundation has announced the list of grants and ecosystem support projects for the first quarter of 2026, focusing on cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs (ZK), protocol security, and core infrastructure development, continuously strengthening the Ethereum underlying technology stack and long-term scalability.This quarter's funding covers several key areas. At the protocol and client level, projects include optimizations for the Geth and Erigon clients, upgrades to the Lighthouse client, and the development of network monitoring tools after the Pectra upgrade, with a focus on improving network performance and attack resistance. Additionally, projects such as HSM key management, the validator security tool Vero, and the DISC-NG node discovery mechanism have also received support to enhance node-level reliability and institutional compliance capabilities.In the areas of cryptography and ZK, the foundation continues to invest in projects such as the analysis of the Poseidon hash function, research on Gröbner basis attacks, exploration of quantum-resistant and homomorphic mixed encryption, and formal verification of RISC-V zkVM, further strengthening the security boundaries of zero-knowledge proofs and cryptographic infrastructure.In terms of the developer ecosystem, the BuidlGuidl education system upgrade, ERC standard community building, WalletConnect clear signature library, and Open Creator Rails toolchain are continuously advancing to lower development barriers and enhance user interaction security. Meanwhile, L2BEAT continues to provide transparency analysis for Layer 2, strengthening the data infrastructure for scaling ecosystems.Furthermore, the foundation supports privacy technologies (such as Tor integration and Privacy Pool SDK), decentralized identity (did:ethr standard upgrade), DAO governance research, and public goods experimental projects, covering a complete ecological structure from the protocol layer to the application layer. Overall, this round of funding continues Ethereum's long-term investment in the three core directions of "cryptography + ZK + protocol engineering," emphasizing the support for future multi-layer scaling and institutional-level application implementation through infrastructure and standardization development.

According to Decrypt, Admiral Samuel Paparo, the commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, stated during a hearing before the U.S. House Armed Services Committee that the U.S. government is currently running a Bitcoin node for cybersecurity-related testing, but is not engaged in mining.Paparo indicated that the U.S. military's interest in Bitcoin primarily focuses on its value as a computer science tool, including cryptography, blockchain, and reusable proof-of-work mechanisms, with the aim of using the Bitcoin protocol to strengthen cybersecurity and enhance military capabilities, which is still in the experimental stage. He also mentioned that maintaining the global dominance of the U.S. dollar aligns with U.S. military interests and gave a positive evaluation of the stablecoin legalization bill, the GENIUS Act, signed by Trump last summer, believing that the bill helps to solidify the global position of the dollar.