The International Association of Cryptologic Research held their regular election using secure voting software called Helios…and lost the keys to decrypt the results, leaving them with no choice but to throw out the vote and call a new election. Hilarity ensues. We welcome special guest Matt Bernhard who actually works on secure voting systems to explain which bits are homomorphically additive or not.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euw_yqAQFI8

Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2025/12/30/iacr-helios

Links:

- NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/world/cryptography-group-lost-election-results.html
- IACR Memo: https://www.iacr.org/news/item/27138
- https://www.iacr.org/elections/
- https://vote.heliosvoting.org/faq
- https://github.com/Election-Tech-Initiative/electionguard
- https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/sec08/tech/full_papers/adida/adida.pdf
- https://www.iacr.org/elections/eVoting/about-helios.html
- https://www.iacr.org/elections/eVoting/
- https://crypto.ethz.ch/publications/files/CrGeSc97b.pdf
- https://electionguard.vote/
- https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1901
- https://freeandfair.us/blog/open-free-election-technology/
- https://www.starvoting.org/
- https://mbernhard.com/

"Security Cryptography Whatever" is hosted by Deirdre Connolly (@durumcrustulum), Thomas Ptacek (@tqbf), and David Adrian (@davidcadrian)

Apple announced its new suite of memory security improvements from the top of the stack all the way to the bottom, so we dug through what they did and how they did it (performantly).

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FJwOI2PliU

Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2025/10/31/apple-mie

Links:

- https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement/
- Secure Page Table Monitor and Trusted Execution Monitor: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/operating-system-integrity-sec8b776536b/1/web/1#secd022396fb
- https://security.apple.com/blog/towards-the-next-generation-of-xnu-memory-safety/
- https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/adopting-type-aware-memory-allocation
- https://security.apple.com/blog/what-if-we-had-sockpuppet-in-ios16/
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09272
- https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2023/11/first-handset-with-mte-on-market.html
- https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/adopting-type-aware-memory-allocation
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09272
- https://spectreattack.com/spectre.pdf

"Security Cryptography Whatever" is hosted by Deirdre Connolly (@durumcrustulum), Thomas Ptacek (@tqbf), and David Adrian (@davidcadrian)

There was a bug in an OpenPGP library which finally gave us an excuse to tear encrypted email via PGP to shreds. Our special guest William Woodruff joined us to help explain the vuln and indulge our gnashing of teeth on why email was never meant to be encrypted and how other modern tools do the job much, much better.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoL3LfIozJo

Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2025/08/22/stop-using-encrypted-email-with-william-woodruff

Links:

- William Woodruff: https://yossarian.net/
- https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted/
- https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4880
- https://codeanlabs.com/blog/research/cve-2025-47934-spoofing-openpgp-js-signatures/
- https://www.mailpile.is/blog/2014-10-07_Some_Thoughts_on_GnuPG.html
- https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9580.html
- https://www.tumblr.com/accidentallyquadratic
- https://www.w3.org/TR/xmldsig-core/
- https://support.yubico.com/hc/en-us/articles/360013790259-Using-Your-YubiKey-with-OpenPGP
- https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9580.html#name-signature-packet-type-id-2
- https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9580.html#name-key-derivation-function
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME
- https://delta.chat
- https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
- https://phakeobj.netlify.app/posts/gigacage/
- https://x.com/dakami

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"Security Cryptography Whatever" is hosted by Deirdre Connolly (@durumcrustulum), Thomas Ptacek (@tqbf), and David Adrian (@davidcadrian)