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Getting ahead of ‘harvest-now-decrypt-later’: Post-quantum cryptography planning
Opinion piece urges organizations to begin post-quantum cryptography migration now, citing harvest-now-decrypt-later risk and NIST deadlines.
CSO Online outlines why harvest-now-decrypt-later makes long-lived sensitive data a current risk even before quantum computers exist. It cites NIST IR 8547 timelines deprecating RSA-2048 and ECC P-256 by 2030 and removing them by 2035, finalized FIPS standards ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA, upcoming FN-DSA (FIPS 206), NSA requirements for national security systems from 2027, and UK NCSC phased guidance through 2035. The author recommends cryptographic discovery, crypto-agility, and prioritizing long-confidentiality data and TLS endpoints.
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Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0 (1999)
Seminal 1999 USENIX study finds most novice users cannot correctly sign and encrypt email with PGP 5.0 in 90 minutes.
Whitten and Tygar's USENIX Security Symposium paper evaluates whether cryptography novices can use PGP 5.0 effectively, using cognitive walkthrough analysis and a laboratory user test. The majority of test participants failed to successfully sign and encrypt a message within 90 minutes, despite PGP 5.0 having a well-regarded graphical interface. The authors argue that security requires usability standards beyond those of general consumer software and propose domain-specific UI design principles for security. The paper is a foundational reference in usable security research.
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EFI Pairs Without One-Way Puzzles: Oracle Separations from Communication Complexity
Theorists build a classical oracle where one-way puzzles fail yet EFI pairs survive, separating two candidate minimal assumptions of quantum cryptography.
The paper constructs a single classical oracle relative to which one-way puzzles do not exist, even with an unbounded verifier, while an EFI pair survives every classical-query distinguisher holding advice, making one superposition query at the end. Security is proven by reducing adversary knowledge to communication complexity for Vector-in-Subspace, with the superposition query bounded using random matrix theory. Relative to the oracle, quantum polynomial time offers no advantage on tasks with classical inputs and outputs and there is no proof of quantumness, separating the leading minimal assumptions of quantum cryptography.
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Zombie Card Attack Can Revive Expired Visa Cards for Contactless Payments
UMass Amherst researchers demonstrate Zombie Card, an NFC relay attack that revives expired Visa contactless cards for in-store purchases without breaking cryptography.
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst presented the Zombie Card attack at USENIX Security 2026, showing that Visa's Kernel 3 does not cryptographically bind the Application Expiration Date (tag 5F24) the terminal reads with the Track 2 expiry seen by the issuer. By positioning an NFC man-in-the-middle relay, an attacker can rewrite the terminal-facing expiration date of an expired card and complete contactless purchases, provided the account remains open under the same PAN and the bank does not independently re-check expiry. Testing across five major US banks found three distinct policies; Visa Kernel 3 accepted the modified date, while Mastercard, American Express, and Discover kernels declined modified transactions. Findings were disclosed to Visa and affected banks in May 2025, no CVE has been assigned, and no exploitation has been reported.
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Automatic Key Exchange: faster, post-quantum secure origin handshakes for 45 billion daily connections (and counting)
Cloudflare's Automatic Key Exchange probes origins to lead with preferred key exchange, cutting HelloRetryRequests from 52% to 3.7% and enabling automatic post-quantum origin connections.
Cloudflare announced Automatic Key Exchange, an extension of Automatic SSL/TLS that probes each origin's supported key agreement algorithms and leads with the preferred one, favoring the post-quantum hybrid X25519MLKEM768. Rollover across roughly 45 billion daily origin connections cut HelloRetryRequests from about 52% to 3.7%, saving more than 150 ms of p90 handshake latency. Hundreds of thousands of domains now receive post-quantum origin connections without manual configuration, supporting Cloudflare's goal of quantum-safe encryption by 2029 to counter harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks.
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I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s
Security researcher factored two 512-bit RSA root CA keys from defunct 1990s certificate authority E-Certify using CADO-NFS on a desktop in roughly 30 hours each.
A researcher extracted legacy root certificates from archived Netscape and Internet Explorer installers, identifying two 512-bit RSA roots shipped with Netscape 4.51 in 1999 by the defunct Canadian CA E-Certify. Using CADO-NFS on a Ryzen 9 5950X desktop, the keys were factored in 32 and 29 hours respectively, allowing private key reconstruction. The work comes shortly after RSA-260 (862-bit) was factored, the largest known factorization to date. The researcher also built a legacy TLS server and published keys and tools on GitHub.
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Google Password Manager Attacks Could Let Malware Hijack Passkey
Unit 42 details three attack paths letting Windows malware silently sign into passkey-protected accounts via Chrome's Google Password Manager without user verification.
Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 described three post-compromise attack paths—Pass-ta-key, Silver Pass-ta-key and Golden Pass-ta-key—against Chrome's Google Password Manager cloud authenticator on TPM-equipped Windows systems. The attacks can silently obtain valid authentication assertions, install attacker-controlled user-verification keys, or extract the 32-byte Security Domain Secret used to decrypt synced passkey private keys, enabling reusable access from the attacker's own environment. No CVE was assigned and no exploitation in the wild was reported; demonstrations were validated against Chrome 142 and parts of the architecture are corroborated by Chromium source. GitHub enforced the User Verified flag check, while eBay accepted a test assertion lacking it before fixing its validation gap after disclosure.
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