Long-time Slashdot reader BrianFagioli is announcing that he's released a new iPhone app that creates a cryptographic witness for photos without uploading the original image. The app hashes the file, signs the hash using a dedicated identity stored in Apple Keychain, and publishes the witness to Nostr relays while keeping the photo inside the app unless the user chooses to export it. Rather than trying to determine whether a scene was genuine, the app — named Veridenz — answers a narrower question, by verifying whether a photo file matches the one that was originally witnessed. Users do not need a Nostr account because the app creates its own signing identity, keeping private documentation separate from a public Nostr profile. "The developer does not collect any data from this app," says its page in Apple's iPhone store. The app's tagline is "Capture. Prove. Verify."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Apple has launched a new legal challenge against a UK government demand to access its customers' highly encrypted data, a year after the Home Office agreed to abandon its previous request. The US tech company launched the legal complaint last month at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), an independent court that has the power to investigate claims that the UK intelligence services have acted unlawfully. The UK government had made a second request to Apple to grant it a "back door" to encrypted iCloud data belonging to British users, according to an order issued by the court. Britain backed down on its original demand for access to data from UK and US customers last year, after a heated transatlantic tussle over encryption between London and Washington. UK authorities subsequently issued a new "technical capability notice" (TCN) to Apple that did not apply to American users. Apple is seeking to challenge the British government's powers to issue TCNs under the UK Investigatory Powers Act, according to the details of the new legal case first reported by the Financial Times. [...] The original TCN issued last year asked Apple for the right to see users' encrypted data protected by its advanced data protection (ADP) program in the event of a national security risk. Apple said the removal of the tool -- which not even it can access -- would make users more vulnerable to data breaches from bad actors and other threats to customer privacy. Creating a "back door" would also mean all data was accessible by Apple, which it could be forced to share with law enforcement possessing a warrant. As a result, Apple withdrew UK customers' access to its ADP program in January 2025. The Home Office has maintained that the Investigatory Powers Act, under which such orders are issued, contains robust safeguards and is used only when absolutely necessary.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the most difficult obstacles to overcome in the quantum race will be the supply chain, given how diffuse it is, a top White House official said Wednesday.

“Supply chain is one of the biggest challenges in my mind, and really, the challenge with the quantum supply chain is that quantum is not defined by a single hardware platform,” said Brad Blakestad, director of the National Quantum Coordination Office within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

“If you look at the quantum computing technologies, the quantum sensing technologies, the networking — those are all different,” he said in a webinar hosted by Inside Cybersecurity and USTelecom. “And even within computing, there’s seven different modalities that use completely different components. So we have this not just one monolithic supply chain, but just a bunch of different supply chains that are kind of intertwined in various ways.”

Blakestad made his remarks a little more than a month after President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on quantum computing. He referenced proposed ways to address the supply chain challenge in one of the orders.

“The other major issue or challenge that we face right now is that we’re on the cusp of quantum exploding from a commercialization perspective, but we’re not quite there yet,” he said. “So there’s not the funding, the revenue coming from large-scale quantum companies at this point to really make the supply chain as robust as you would want. So thinking about it from the government perspective, it’s just [that] there are too many places that I would want to bolster and not enough funding to do it.”

Blakestad touted steps to help that along such as the government buying widgets from a company that makes them to certain specifications, or prize challenges.

The quantum supply chain isn’t just diffuse in the United States, an International Institute for Strategic Studies policy paper noted Wednesday. It’s “inherently international: no single country dominates the supply chain, whether specialised materials, cryogenic equipment, hardware, software, fabrication or algorithms,” the authors, Dongyoun Cho and Maria Shagina, wrote.

And a March report from the Center for a New American Security identified strengthening the quantum supply chain as pivotal to the United States seizing the benefits of the technology, citing gaps in the U.S. supply chain and reliance on foreign suppliers such as China and Russia. 

Supply chain wasn’t the only obstacle Blakestad mentioned as looming large.

“The encryption challenge is a real challenge, and we want to make sure that we are aware of when quantum computers will ultimately get to a scale that they start having these sorts of implications and move as quickly as we can,” he said. “So, just by owning the technologies, by owning the workforce, by making the United States the place that people want to come to be on the cutting edge of this technology, I think that kind of addresses both of those issues, and that’s what makes it so critical.”

Another difficulty is measuring progress, Blakestad said: “It’s also very, very hard to benchmark, and to know that you’re actually doing what you’re supposed to, what you are intending to do.”

The post Supply chain challenges loom large in quantum race, White House official says appeared first on CyberScoop.

Anthropic researchers used Claude Mythos Preview to find new weaknesses in two cryptographic methods, the company said Tuesday, including one that is being considered by the National Institute of Standards and Technology for both traditional and quantum computing.  

In a blog post detailing the work, the frontier AI company called it a “substantial” research advancement, but also emphasized that neither flaw affects software now in use.

“The attacks described in these two papers are the strongest attacks we have found to date,” the company wrote in the post. 

One of the weaknesses found was in HAWK, a digital signature scheme under review by the NIST as part of a search for encryption methods that could survive attacks from quantum computers. Working with a human researcher, the AI system found a mathematical shortcut, known as a nontrivial automorphism, in the lattice structure (a complex mathematical grid underpinning its security) HAWK relies on.

The discovered weakness cuts HAWK’s effective key strength in half, meaning key sizes would need to double to keep the same level of security. Anthropic said that change would erase much of what made HAWK an appealing candidate in the first place.

Ellen Boehm, senior vice president of strategy and AI innovation at Keyfactor, a digital identity and cryptography management provider, told CyberScoop that research like Anthropic’s proves that the NIST PQC evaluation process is working. 

She also said the research “elevates the importance for organizations to have visibility of where cryptography sits inside their enterprise, what business systems and processes it’s connected to, and the need for PQC readiness, if they haven’t already built a plan.” 

The other flaw was found in a weakened version of the Advanced Encryption Standard, or AES, the cipher NIST adopted in 2001 and the most widely used method for scrambling data in transit. Working largely on its own, Mythos invented a mathematical shortcut dubbed the “Möbius Bridge.” While real-world encryption scrambles data through 10 sequential layers, or “rounds,” researchers regularly study a simplified seven-round test version to measure security margins. In previous theoretical attacks, codebreakers had to check 256 separate values against a memory table, but Mythos created a shortcut that eliminated that lookup process entirely.

Combined with other optimizations, this discovery made the strongest known theoretical attack against seven-round AES 200 to 800 times faster. The attack is purely theoretical: It requires an impossible amount of target data — over 400 octillion messages — and cannot touch the full 10-round encryption protecting everyday software. Additionally, Anthropic pointed out that real-world systems remain completely safe.

Anthropic said it followed standard disclosure practices, notifying HAWK’s designers in June and coordinating public release with a NIST mailing list, and briefing government and industry partners beforehand. It also worked with researchers at ETH Zurich, Tel Aviv University and the University of Haifa to build a shared testing tool, called CryptanalysisBench, meant to let other researchers measure how AI systems perform against a range of ciphers.

The findings come as frontier AI models are being deployed by cybersecurity researchers in order to find vulnerabilities in all kinds of software. In June, intelligence agencies in the Five Eyes alliance warned that advanced AI models capable of wreaking havoc in the cyber domain are “months away.” However, a recent report found that despite the avalanche of bugs being unearthed, the threat level across the internet has not materially changed. 

Anthropic said it expects the same AI capabilities eventually to be applied to systems already in wide use, raising a separate question it said it has not yet resolved: how researchers, companies and governments should respond if a language model uncovers a flaw in a cryptographic system that protects critical infrastructure.

“As we develop increasingly powerful cryptanalytic results, it would be prudent to consider how researchers should react if a language model were to discover vulnerabilities in cryptosystems where attacks do have an immediate real-world impact,” the company wrote. “We hope that our work here will help launch these conversations.” 

Boehm said work like Anthropic’s further shows that enterprises should not rest on their laurels with any facet of their security apparatus. 

“AI is becoming a powerful tool for many things, including software quality assurance, code development, and in this case cryptographic analysis,” she told CyberScoop. “As AI tools become more widely and continuously used, it just elevates the need for enterprises to treat their trust infrastructure in an ongoing, operational manner versus thinking of it as a static environment that only changes every few years as new cryptographic algorithms are released.”

The post Here’s what Anthropic found when it turned Mythos loose on encryption algorithms appeared first on CyberScoop.

Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview has "found flaws in a weakened version of a digital encryption standard that is in pervasive use throughout the internet," reports The New York Times. Researchers said the model discovered novel attacks against weakened versions of AES and the experimental post-quantum HAWK system, including one that was 200 to 1,000 times faster than previous human-developed methods. From the report: The flaws identified do not concern a cryptographic standard currently in use today, which means that modern banking and communication systems are not subject to immediate potential intrusions from A.I. Instead, Anthropic's technology cracked a watered-down version of an algorithm for Advanced Encryption Standard, or A.E.S., a ubiquitous protocol that safeguards web traffic, wireless networks, data storage and more. It is common to perform tests on weaker versions of encryption algorithms to understand whether more powerful computers could someday crack the actual standards, akin to solving a simpler math problem to identify whether patterns may exist for a more complicated one. In the testing, Mythos was able to break the weaker version of Advanced Encryption Standard in a way that Anthropic said made an assault 200 to 1,000 times faster than what previous human research had managed to do. While the immediate ramifications are minimal, the long-term implications could be significant. In previous tests, large-language models seemingly could not match or best what humans can do in the mathematically dense field of cryptographic research, but their rapid advances could suggest a future in which top models can surmount traditional internet security protections that are foundational to just about everything that takes place on the internet. [...] In addition to the attack on the encryption standard, Mythos also orchestrated another improved attack against a different digital cryptographic system known as HAWK that is designed to be bulletproof against both traditional and quantum computers. HAWK is not currently in use, but under consideration by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to become a new standard. The HAWK attack was validated by its authors, and independent cryptographers reviewed the Advanced Encryption Standard attack, Anthropic said, adding that it had shared its findings with the U.S. government and industry partners ahead of publication. Mythos devised the cryptographic attack on A.E.S. almost entirely autonomously, Anthropic said, but only after first refusing to contemplate the problem because it believed it was impossible to improve on existing methods of analysis. But after some coaxing, the chatbot sat with the puzzle for about a week before engineering its novel attack. Two human researchers then worked for nearly a month to verify that the method appeared correct. "Given that we are constantly underestimating the power and time of availability of future models, are we really comfortable that two years from now strong encryption won't be threatened?" said Glenn S. Gerstell, the former general counsel at the National Security Agency. "Mathematicians would tell you that it shouldn't be possible given current computing powers to break strong encryption in any meaningful time," added Mr. Gerstell, who helped write a report on cryptology in 2022. "But I don't think the capabilities of future models in the medium term -- before quantum computing or quantum-proof cryptography -- should be dismissed as trivial in this context."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Post-quantum cryptography didn’t sneak up on the industry. 

For years, security teams, standards bodies, hyperscalers, and governments have been pointing at the same horizon: a cryptographically relevant quantum computer will, eventually, dismantle the public-key algorithms underpinning today’s enterprise security. The latest executive order doesn’t introduce a new threat. It codifies what the field has long understood, and attaches deadlines to it.

For CISOs, the framing shift matters. PQC is fundamentally a readiness problem, not a cryptography problem. Watching Google accelerate its quantum roadmap, or seeing federal agencies restructure their security architecture around PQC, makes the stakes impossible to ignore.” Boards are already asking: “How are we thinking about post-quantum transition today?” For most organizations, the gap between that question and a credible answer is wider than it should be.

The EO is unambiguous on scope. PQC has moved from a research effort to real policy, with deadlines, accountability structures, and direct consequences for federal agencies, contractors, critical infrastructure operators, and the broader private sector that supports them.

Federal high-value systems must transition key establishment to PQC by Dec. 31, 2030. Digital signatures will follow by Dec. 31, 2031.

Those dates may appear distant, but for anyone who has navigated an enterprise-scale security transformation, with the procurement cycles, architecture reviews, and organizational change management that entails, 2030 sits squarely inside current planning horizons. The window for orderly execution is already narrowing.

What makes that window even tighter is that the most immediate risk has nothing to do with deadlines. “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” attacks are already operational. Nation-state adversaries are collecting encrypted data today and storing it until quantum capabilities are sufficient to decrypt it: intellectual property, health records, financial transactions, source code, government communications, and more. The encryption protecting that data right now is, functionally, a time-delayed vulnerability. Long-lived sensitive data may already be compromised in ways that won’t become visible for years.

The first step for CISOs is shifting from awareness to ownership.

PQC readiness cannot be delegated to individual application teams or treated as a future compliance checkbox. That approach will not survive given the EO’s accountability requirements. Every organization needs a point person: a program lead, a cross-functional steering committee, or a dedicated cryptographic risk office. Whatever the structure, it needs authority and a seat at the leadership table.

That ownership must span security, IT, infrastructure, engineering, product, legal, compliance, procurement, and business stakeholders. Cryptography is embedded across the entire enterprise: certificates, keys, protocols, APIs, hardware, cloud services, code-signing systems, identity infrastructure, third-party platforms. No single team has the bandwidth to address this alone. A cross-functional working group or Center of Excellence should be an organizational prerequisite as we move into the future.

Visibility is going to be critical, and this is where most organizations will find the largest gaps.

CISOs need a clear picture of where cryptography exists across their environment: which algorithms are in use, which systems depend on vulnerable cryptography, what data requires long-term confidentiality, and which business processes would be disrupted by migration. Without that inventory, risk assessment is guesswork, remediation is impossible, and demonstrating progress to regulators or boards becomes an exercise in speculation.

The principle is straightforward: you cannot protect what you cannot see.

Furthermore, a cryptographic inventory cannot be a static spreadsheet updated annually and then filed away. It needs to function as a living view of the organization’s trust infrastructure, covering certificates, keys, algorithms, libraries, protocols, signing systems, certificate authorities, HSMs, workloads, devices, and third-party dependencies. 

Once that visibility exists, prioritization follows from business impact. Systems protecting long-lived sensitive data, critical infrastructure, customer trust, software integrity, and regulated environments move first, with everything else sequenced accordingly.

Beyond visibility, CISOs need a roadmap aligned to the order’s milestones rather than aspirational planning documents that never translate into funded programs.

The 2030 key establishment deadline requires understanding every point where encryption and key exchange mechanisms operate across critical systems. The 2031 digital signatures deadline extends that challenge to software integrity, code signing, document signing, authentication, identity infrastructure, and long-term verification. This is a multi-year transformation program, and it warrants the same organizational rigor as any other enterprise-wide initiative of comparable scope.

That means three categories of dedicated resources. First, funding: PQC readiness cannot be absorbed into existing security budgets without displacing other priorities. It requires multi-year investment in discovery tooling, testing, migration execution, automation, and governance. Second, talent: organizations need cryptography expertise, enterprise architecture capability, PKI experience, risk management, compliance support, and program leadership, a combination already in short supply across the industry. Third, technology: discovery tools, certificate and key lifecycle automation, policy enforcement, reporting infrastructure, and the architectural capability for crypto-agility.

Crypto-agility is the long-term objective that makes this transition worth doing properly.

Organizations that treat PQC as a one-time algorithm swap will find themselves back in the same position when standards shift again. The quantum transition is occurring in parallel with the rise of AI, machine identities, autonomous systems, and increasingly complex digital ecosystems, all of which depend on cryptographic trust. Organizations that do not actively govern that trust infrastructure will struggle with AI security, software supply chain integrity, identity governance, and the compliance mandates that follow.

The order functions as a forcing mechanism, converting PQC from a future technical concern into a present-day leadership accountability. Three questions now define where an organization stands:

• Do we have a clear picture of where our cryptographic risk lives?
• Do we have a funded, sequenced migration plan that meets the order’s deadlines?
• Can we demonstrate that our trust infrastructure is agile enough to adapt as standards and threats continue to evolve?

The debate over precisely when quantum computing will be a reality is a distraction. Building the visibility, governance, funding, and automation required to move with confidence is where we need to be spending our collective time and effort.

CISOs have moved past the question of whether to act. The operative question is how far behind the organization already is, and how quickly it can transform cryptography from an invisible dependency into a managed, measurable, and adaptive system of trust. The organizations that begin that work now will be the ones with options when the deadlines arrive.

The post What the post-quantum executive order really demands of CISOs appeared first on CyberScoop.

President Donald Trump signed two executive orders Monday to accelerate the federal government’s transition to post-quantum encryption and reprioritize government financing to support the domestic quantum computing industry. 

The orders, which CyberScoop first reported on last year, direct the government to throw its weight behind the quantum computing industry. They are part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to put its stamp on the development of another key emerging technology.

In May, the Department of Commerce announced letters of intent for more than $2 billion in federal financing incentives for nine quantum companies under the CHIPS and Science Act. Last year, the administration did something similar with its AI-focused executive orders and action plan that created special federal export programs for AI technology and equipment, directed federal agencies to mobilize federal financing tools to support the industry, and cut or curtail regulations that the administration said may impede domestic growth. 

Ahead of the signing, sources previewed details of those orders to CyberScoop. Per one of those sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss pending administration actions, a “whole of government approach is used to empower research and development into quantum computing, as well as quantum sensing [and other resources].”

They described the Trump administration’s attitude for propping up industry as “don’t let us miss out on prioritizing the feeders for the research or the development of quantum.” 

The second order requires federal civilian networks to adopt quantum-resistant encryption faster than the current 2035 deadline. The new encryption algorithms, vetted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, will protect against future quantum computer attacks. 

Agencies that miss the new deadline must report to the Office of Management and Budget explaining why. 

On hand for the signing were Department of Energy Undersecretary for Science Darío Gil, Department of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Federal Chief Information Officer Greg Barbaccia, and Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratisos.

Multiple executives from technology companies were also on hand for the order’s signing, complimentary of the government’s efforts in boosting the industry.

“IBM applauds the Administration for taking this important, timely step forward,” said IBM CEO Arvind Krishna in a statement. “Sound policy, sustained investment and public-private partnership are vital to sustaining U.S. quantum leadership and technological resilience. We’re proud to keep building on this foundation — strengthening U.S. competitiveness and bolstering national security as we shape the quantum future together.”

“At Google, we are proud of our sustained breakthroughs in quantum computing and post-quantum cryptography,” said Google President and Chief Investment Officer Ruth Porat. “Quantum computing is a transformational technology that can advance national security, drug discovery, energy solutions and more.”

Update; 6/22/26; 5:20 p.m.: This story was updated after the signing with details about the orders, signing ceremony attendees, and comments from IBM’s Arvind Krishna and Google’s Ruth Porat.

The post Trump executive orders speed up post-quantum migration, boost industry appeared first on CyberScoop.

Last week, AMD was found to have stripped memory encryption from its consumer CPUs without any warning or notice. Now, following a wave of backlash on social media, the chipmaker has now reinstated the protection, though it still hasn't explained why the safeguard was disabled in the first place. Ars Technica reports: Following the revelation, social media was deluged by comments from AMD consumers decrying the move. They noted that AMD's quiet removal of TSME after supporting it for so long seemed underhanded. The move came solely as a result of firmware changes made in a recent update. With no physical changes required to silicon, continued support was largely, if not purely, a matter of will rather than a necessity required by changes to hardware. The critics called on AMD to reverse the move. Over the weekend, AMD said it planned to do just that in a firmware update scheduled for release next month. More often than not, the chipmaker refers to TSME as Memory Guard. "Regarding certain non-PRO Ryzen 9000-series desktop processors, a BIOS option to enable Memory Guard was previously available but was removed in a recent update," AMD said in an email. "Based on valuable community feedback, we will reinstate this option in an upcoming BIOS release in July." The company has yet to explain why it removed the protection. Critics speculate that AMD dropped it in an attempt to steer customers toward more costly CPUs. It's possible, though, that there were less nefarious reasons, such as the difficulty of continued support as chip designs changed. Another possibility is that AMD made the move for performance reasons. Encrypting and decrypting data in memory creates latency. Slowdowns are the enemy of gamers, one of the more popular customer segments using the 9000-line of Ryzen processors. Since many gamers already voluntarily disabled TSME and had little need for it in the first place, AMD may not have considered the change of much consequence.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader smooth wombat writes: Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley papers for his assistant Donald Bayley who held onto the papers until his death in 2020, reveal Turning had produced a working model of a portable voice encryption device. He even demonstrated it by using a Winston Churchill speech recording. "Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack," Jack Copeland wrote in an article for IEEE Spectrum, "Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack." More from Popular Mechanics: Turingâ(TM)s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes âoewas a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.â The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well... [T]he reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isnâ(TM)t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasnâ(TM)t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turingâ(TM)s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turingâ(TM)s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Starting in 2027, France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI will stop certifying security products that lack quantum-resistant encryption, effectively forcing government agencies and critical infrastructure operators to phase out older cryptographic systems. Reuters reports: Samih Souissi, ANSSI's chief of staff, said at the France Quantum conference that the agency would halt such certifications from 2027, and that businesses should be buying only quantum-safe products by 2030. ANSSI approval is required for use in French government agencies and critical infrastructure, making the policy a de facto phase-out of older encryption. "It's not only a technical issue," Souissi said. "It's a matter of governance, industrial planning, regulation, and sovereignty." The move reflects concern that attackers may store encrypted data now and unlock it later when quantum computers become strong enough to crack today's protections, a risk known as "harvest now, decrypt later."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has released quantum-resistant cryptographic code and the mathematical verification tools it developed to prove the code’s correctness, making them publicly available for independent review and broader use across the industry.

The release includes implementations of two quantum-secure algorithms, ML-KEM and ML-DSA, along with the formal verification libraries and tools Apple created to validate their accuracy. The company also published detailed documentation of its verification methodology, which it describes as achieving the strongest known correctness results for any widely deployed production implementation of these algorithms.

The quantum-secure algorithms are integrated into corecrypto, Apple’s cryptographic library used across its operating systems. The library handles encryption, decryption, hashing, and digital signatures on over 2.5 billion active devices. Apple began deploying quantum-resistant encryption in iMessage in 2024 and has expanded the technology to VPN services and TLS networking protocols.

One of the tools released is the company’s Cryptol-to-Isabelle translator, which converts cryptographic models between formal languages, along with supporting libraries needed to reproduce the results. Formal verification uses mathematical proofs to show that code works correctly for all possible inputs. Apple translated its code into Cryptol, a formal language developed by Galois, then into Isabelle, a proof assistant from the University of Cambridge and The Technical University of Munich, to prove both matched the official standards. Apple has used Isabelle previously to verify hardware cryptographic components.

The verification process uncovered errors that conventional testing would have missed. Researchers found a missing computational step in the ML-DSA code that would have silently broken digital signatures. If this bug had reached production, messages in iMessage may have appeared authenticated when they actually weren’t, leaving users unaware their communications lacked proper security.

Even with these tools, Apple acknowledged that it still depends on conventional cryptographic testing and evaluation is needed for assurance. Formal verification can catch errors that traditional testing simply cannot find. Testing works by trying many scenarios, but with complex cryptographic code, there are too many possible inputs to test exhaustively. Subtle bugs can hide in the gaps between test cases and never trigger a warning. Formal verification, by contrast, uses mathematics to prove correctness across all possible inputs at once.

However, Apple’s team writes that it couldn’t formally verify every single aspect of their code with the tools available, so they combined approaches: formal verification for core mathematical correctness, conventional testing for aspects formal methods couldn’t cover, and careful evaluation of how all the pieces work together. Apple argues this hybrid approach provides the most robust security for critical cryptographic software.

“Based on our work to date, we believe that the strongest assurance possible comes from combining formal verification with conventional methods and critically evaluating the end-to-end results,” the blog post reads.

Furthermore, the blog states that Apple selected ML-KEM and ML-DSA from among several standardized quantum-resistant algorithms because they best matched the company’s requirements for security, performance, and compact parameters. The algorithms address the threat posed by future quantum computers, which could potentially break the encryption methods currently protecting digital communications.

More information can be found on Apple’s corecrypto GitHub page. 

The post Apple open-sources quantum-resistant encryption code appeared first on CyberScoop.

Earlier this month, ShinyHunters breached Instructure’s Canvas platform twice within a single week — stealing 3.65 terabytes of data from approximately 275 million users across more than 8,000 institutions. The group defaced login pages at hundreds of schools during final exam periods, forced Canvas offline, and extracted a ransom payment before Congress opened a formal investigation. The attack did not require exotic malware or zero-day exploits. Attackers entered through compromised “Free-For-Teacher” accounts, escalated rapidly, and exfiltrated sensitive data at scale before Instructure could contain them.

That sequence — entry through weak identity controls, rapid lateral movement, mass exfiltration, extortion, disruption — is now the standard playbook. It will happen again, unless the priority for security and technology leaders becomes reducing the blast radius of every intrusion before it happens.

The problem with how enterprises think about SaaS risk

Modern organizations have consolidated critical operations inside shared SaaS platforms, creating enormous concentrations of risk in single points of failure. When Canvas went down, thousands of students could not access coursework, faculty lost contact with their classes, and administrators scrambled to postpone exams. The scale of disruption came from how deeply institutions depended on Canvas, not from the vulnerability alone.

That asymmetry is the defining feature of SaaS risk in 2026. A single compromised account at a shared platform can trigger sector-wide operational failure. Yet most enterprise security frameworks still treat SaaS platforms primarily as availability problems — measured by uptime, recovery time objectives, and business continuity plans. Canvas exposed the gap in that thinking. Availability means nothing when the platform is operational but the data inside it has already been stolen.

Resilience in SaaS environments requires a harder and more honest premise: treat compromise as continuous and expected. Attackers will reach critical systems. The real test is how much they can take, how far they can move, and how long they can persist before detection and containment.

Identity is the perimeter now

The Canvas attack followed a pattern that has repeated across sectors for years. By compromising legitimate accounts with excessive standing privileges, the attackers moved laterally through Canvas infrastructure, maintained persistence, and exfiltrated data at a scale that took days to quantify.

Too many organizations still operate with fragmented identity controls, inconsistent privilege management, and limited visibility into how accounts interact across SaaS integrations. When attackers compromise a legitimate account, they inherit whatever access that account holds — and in most environments, that access far exceeds what the user actually needs. The result is that identity has become the most reliable attack surface in the modern enterprise, and most organizations are still treating it as a secondary concern.

Strong passwords and multifactor authentication are necessary but no longer sufficient. Enterprises need continuous identity verification, tightly scoped privileges, aggressive governance over third-party integrations, and real-time visibility into anomalous access patterns across SaaS systems. Identity governance cannot be a compliance checkbox. In cloud-native environments, it should be the primary control that determines how far an attacker can travels if they manage to get inside.

Data protection cannot stop at the application layer

Even organizations with strong identity controls face a second, underappreciated problem: the data stored inside SaaS platforms is often far less protected than the credentials used to access it.

Enterprises accumulate vast repositories of sensitive information inside SaaS environments — private messages, accommodation requests, financial records, personal disclosures — while relying almost entirely on application-level access controls to protect it. When those controls fail, as they did at Canvas, the data is immediately readable, searchable, and monetizable. 

Attackers do not need to crack anything. They simply take it.

Cryptographic protections — including encryption strategies that preserve organizational control over sensitive data even after it leaves the platform — directly reduce the value of a successful exfiltration. Stolen data that cannot be read or used is far less valuable as an extortion instrument. That distinction matters significantly in today’s threat environment, where the leverage attackers extract from stolen data often outlasts the breach itself.

The threat does not expire when the incident ends 

The “agreement” between Canvas’s parent company and attackers illustrates a risk that most organizations have not yet fully priced in. While Instructure received digital confirmation that the stolen data was destroyed, Congress opened an investigation anyway. The Instructure CEO has been called to testify before the House Homeland Security Committee. Affected institutions — many of which had no visibility into Instructure’s security posture or incident response capabilities — remain accountable for protecting student data they can no longer control.

That accountability gap will not close after Congress concludes its inquiry. Sensitive data stolen during incidents like Canvas retains value long after the breach itself. Adversaries increasingly collect encrypted data today with the expectation that it can be decrypted later as cryptographic standards age or quantum computing capabilities mature. This “harvest now, decrypt later” approach means that encryption protecting data only in the present still leaves organizations exposed downstream.

Strong cryptographic protection must therefore be paired with crypto-agility and post-quantum readiness. Security leaders should assume that any sensitive data exfiltrated during a SaaS breach may remain a target for years, not days. If stolen data remains immediately usable, attackers retain leverage indefinitely. If it does not, the economics of extortion shift.

What the Canvas breach actually demands

The lesson from Canvas is not that SaaS platforms are inherently insecure. They remain foundational to how modern organizations operate and scale. The lesson is that the assumptions underlying most enterprise security strategies — that prevention is the primary objective, that access controls are sufficient data protection, that recovery means restoring uptime — no longer match the realities of today’s threat environment.

Attackers have already internalized this. They target SaaS platforms precisely because the concentration of data and operational dependency makes them extraordinarily high-value targets. They exploit identity weaknesses because those weaknesses are pervasive and reliable. They apply extortion pressure because stolen data retains leverage long after technical remediation.

The organizations that close this gap — by treating identity governance as mission-critical infrastructure, implementing cryptographic protections that survive exfiltration, building recovery discipline alongside prevention, and planning for post-quantum exposure — will be significantly better positioned when the next breach arrives. And it will arrive. The only variable is how much it costs.

Rishi Kaushal is the CIO of Entrust, a company that helps organizations fight fraud and cyber threats with identity-centric security.

The post The Canvas breach proved that prevention is no longer enough appeared first on CyberScoop.

Pentest reports sometimes include bad information under a heading like, “Weak TLS Configuration” or “Insecure SSL Certificates.” This article will explain how TLS is supposed to work, common ways it […]

The post Testing TLS and Certificates  appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Sally Vandeven// TL;DR – Passwords stored using reversible encryption, even if they are VERY LONG,  can be trivially reversed by an attacker. Password cracking is quite enjoyable. It is very satisfying […]

The post How I Cracked a 128-bit Password appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

David Fletcher// The following blog post is meant to expand upon the findings commonly identified in BHIS reports.  The “Server Supports Weak Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS)” is almost universal across […]

The post Finding: Server Supports Weak Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Kent Ickler// TLDR: We use a custom dictionary to crack Microsoft Office document encryption.  Then we use a custom dictionary for pwnage in LinkedIn hash database. Background: I recently got […]

The post How to Crack Office Passwords with a Dictionary appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Logan Lembke // Step One: Power. Step Two: Enter. Step Three: ???? Step Four: Profit. In the security industry, we love our encryption. However sometimes, the complexity introduced by encryption […]

The post Two Button PWNage appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Ethan Robish // Let’s Encrypt is a free service that allows you to obtain a free (as in beer) SSL/TLS domain validation certificate to use as you wish.  Here is what […]

The post How Does Let’s Encrypt Gain Your Browser’s Trust? appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Gail Menius // My husband set me up with GPG and Thunderbird and it was too hard. Ethan said it was cool. Lots of people gave it good reviews. It’s […]

The post 5 Reasons for Mailvelope & Easy Instructions appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..