cryptography

GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipherprinzai.com

IBM Built the Cold War’s Most Powerful Code Breaker for the NSAieee.org

IBM’s Harvest (IBM 7950) was a 1960s NSA‑dedicated streaming coprocessor attached to an IBM Stretch mainframe. It ran up to 200× faster than contemporary machines, used a custom bit‑addressable memory model, pipelined parallel streams (P, Q → R), and introduced the world’s first automated tape library. IBM also created a domain‑specific language, Alpha, for cryptanalytic programmers. The article…

Why Does an NPM Math Library Need an Encrypted Loader?safedep.io

SafeDep discovered that several npm packages masquerading as mathjs contain an encrypted loader that only activates when a caller passes a particular matrix to the LU solver, using the matrix’s lower‑triangular factor as the decryption password. The loader decrypts and executes a multi‑stage remote‑access implant that talks to Slack, Telegram and a blockchain contract, and the same technique is r…

The Farnese lettersimonklee.dk

The author reverse‑engineers a 1542 Italian cipher from a Farnese letter by combining digit‑frequency analysis with a beam‑search decoder guided by a five‑gram Italian language model, ultimately recovering the key and partial plaintext.

RSA-896saweis.net

Stephen A. Weis factored the RSA-896 challenge number using Claude on September 19, 2026. The post provides the prime factors p and q for the 896-bit number.

APort Vault: Benchmarking AI Agent Payment Authorization with the Open Agent Passportarxiv.org

APort Vault is a benchmark that replays 4,371 human‑written attacks against a live payment‑handling AI agent across 14 models and multiple policy configurations, generating 225,964 evaluations. Adding the Open Agent Passport pre‑action check eliminated all unauthorized transfers in the test, showing a per‑session breach upper bound of 0.38%.