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OpenSSL’s new alpha build speeds up post-quantum crypto
OpenSSL 4.1.0 alpha1 adds DTLS 1.3 support and speeds up ML-DSA and ML-KEM post-quantum operations across several architectures.
The OpenSSL project released the first alpha of OpenSSL 4.1.0, months before general availability. The build adds DTLS 1.3 (RFC 9147) to secure UDP-based traffic such as VPNs, video calls and IoT, and includes optimized ML-DSA and ML-KEM operations for ppc64le, s390x and x86_64 plus AVX-512 acceleration for SHAKE hashing and AES-CBC decryption. Breaking changes include a new Net::Curl::Easy dependency for tsget, dropped Windows-on-Itanium and Windows CE support, and replacement of the no-ecdsa/no-ecdh Configure options with no-ec. It also adds GREASE support (RFC 8701), a DTLS mode for the SSL listener API, IKEv2 KDF support, and initial Elbrus2000 processor architecture support.
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Risky Bulletin: White House lets private companies carry out offensive cyber ops
A White House memo directs DHS to create a program letting vetted private companies conduct US-government-directed offensive cyber operations against cybercrime.
A presidential memo tasks the DHS National Coordination Center with building a program, under DOJ and DHS oversight, through which private-sector companies can conduct offensive cyber operations against large-scale cybercrime organizations. Requirements include secure facilities, vetted personnel, a $1 million escrow for damages, and written approvals co-signed by DHS and DOJ executive directors. The program must launch within 60 days, around October 11, expanding a March executive order targeting scam compounds, ransomware, and other large-scale cybercrime.
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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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What breach and attack simulation needs to become in the AI era
Picus argues calendar-driven BAS is obsolete as AI compresses exploit timelines, citing 338 million simulations showing 69% prevention and a flat 14% alert score.
In a vendor opinion piece, Picus Security contends that with over 130 CVEs disclosed daily, fewer than 0.5% patched upstream, and disclosure-to-weaponized-exploit timelines near 10 hours, scheduled breach and attack simulation no longer keeps pace. The Picus Blue Report 2026, aggregating 338 million production simulations, found average prevention effectiveness of 69%, 58% of attack actions captured in the SIEM, an unchanged 14% alert score, and detection rule failures driven by performance issues (49%) and silent log collection gaps (41%). Picus proposes agentic BAS as a closed loop—simulate, validate, fix, verify—with AI-built threats and humans at decision gates.
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Risky Bulletin: Russia starts blocking DoH and DoT
Russian users report blocks on DoH and DoT servers, including Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 and Google 8.8.8.8, in an apparent censorship crackdown.
Russian internet users began reporting failures connecting to DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS servers, suggesting a government crackdown on the two privacy protocols. The blocks reportedly cover Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 and Google's 8.8.8.8 resolvers; Roskomnadzor has not officially confirmed the action. The agency tested a similar block in March on Beeline's network and had named DoH for blocking as early as 2021. The bulletin also briefly notes state-sponsored phishing of EU officials, a DDoS against Norway's Digdir, the ReliaQuest/ShinyHunters dispute, and older ransomware and breach disclosures.
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Import AI 470: No rights for machines; automating environment generation with SPADE; and building better GPU kernels with Hawkeye
METR analysis finds AI accelerating cyber vulnerability discovery, while SPADE self-play environment generation improves Qwen3 reasoning benchmark scores at 30B scale.
Import AI 470 discusses a METR research note reporting differential acceleration from AI: major acceleration in reported cyber vulnerabilities (cURL, OpenSSL, Firefox, Microsoft, NVD, OSV), minor acceleration in mathematics, and no measurable acceleration in AI-research optimization benchmarks. It also covers SPADE, a self-play framework from a multi-university team (University of Washington, Stanford, MIT, CMU, and others) that co-evolves executable training environments and agent capability using Environment Designer and Reasoning Agent roles with hint-based regret rewards. Trained on Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507, Qwen3-8B, and Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 via GRPO (400 rollouts of 25 environments), SPADE lifted the 30B-A3B game-environment suite average to 58.3, +8.1 over base, and improved tool-use results across backbones. The issue also references Hawkeye for building better GPU kernels.
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