OpenMatter

Verifiable Collaboration. Computing without Exposure.

[OpenMatter @OpenMatter_]

Turn any agent into a secure agent with auditable, cryptographic compliance.

Stop trusting software guardrails; secure your execution boundary with ZK Firewall.
https://t.co/pAo3neii2D

[OpenMatter @OpenMatter_]

The post-quantum threat will only be accelerated by machine learning. Start testing your PQC environments now.

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Today a crazy quantum story just got wilder.

On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and wakeup call to the blockchain space, those optimisations were illustrated on secp256k1, the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures.

But perhaps the most striking part of the paper was sociological, not technical. Instead of following standard academic process, the optimisations were kept secret, hidden behind a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. Google's accompanying blog post mentions they "engaged with the U.S. government". The ZK proof demonstrates the existence of algorithmic improvements without leaking details. Academic censorship with ZK, a historic first!

As a co-author of the Google paper I witnessed some of the context surrounding this censorship. To be honest, multiple aspects of that context don't sit well with me. As much as I believe the general public ought to know more, I am limited in my ability to whistleblow. Though let me be clear about one thing: the Google team's professionalism has been absolutely exemplary, and they deserve nothing but praise.

Censorship has a way of backfiring. The Streisand effect, where an attempt to bury something only draws more attention to it, is exactly what's unfolding today. First, Google's key optimisation has been rediscovered by the French. And in a thrilling turn of events, a collaborative Shor-at-home challenge just launched. The initiative, available at ecdsa[.]fail, breached a new Shor world record in a matter of hours.

Let's start with the rediscovery. Just two months after Google's paper, French quantum expert André Schrottenloher cracks the main secret optimisation. His paper, titled "Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms", landed on the arXiv today. Big congrats to André, who beat several other nerdsnipped experts to it. In a blog post also published today, Craig Gidney, the world expert on Shor optimisations, revealed that he'd been sitting on this very optimisation for a whole year under censorship pressure.

Interestingly, André missed a handful of minor optimisations, both from Google's original publication and from improvements found since. It's plausible there's still plenty of juice left to squeeze out of Shor, and this is exactly what the ecdsa[.]fail challenge is about. The verifier program developed for the ZK proof does double duty, automatically filtering for valid submissions. Dozens of compounding small and micro improvements are rolling in. As of the time of writing there's an 8.4% improvement to Google's circuit, as measured by the product of logical qubit count and Toffoli gate count. Nice!

The nerdsnipping ran deeper than anyone expected. Over the last few weeks it became clear it extended well beyond André and other quantum experts. Behind the scenes, a small army of amateurs quietly got to work. Inspired by Karpathy-style autoresearch, they turned AI on Shor. Ironically, the verifier program for the ZK proof makes an ideal reward function for AIs. The barrier to entry for this modern style of research is refreshingly low, with several non-experts, even a teenager, finding nice optimisations. Get in touch if you'd like to join a Telegram group with fellow autoresearchers :)

Part 2: neutral atoms and qday

The story doesn't end with Google. On the same day Google went public, a stealthy startup called Oratomic published its own Shor paper in a coordinated release. It made a splash, ultimately becoming the most upvoted paper on scirate[.]com, a website ranking arXiv papers.

Oratomic's claim was wild. By building on Google's logical optimisations and applying custom physical optimisations for neutral atoms, they claimed just 10K physical qubits were sufficient to run Shor's algorithm on secp256k1. That number is mind-bogglingly low.

Knowing essentially nothing about neutral atoms when Oratomic's paper landed, I was intrigued and decided to learn more about the tech. I fell straight down the rabbit hole and spent a couple hundred hours on the topic. I got a little obsessed and watched every YouTube video I could find and spoke to a bunch of experts.

My conclusion? The tech is real, very real. Even Google recently decided to start a neutral atom lab, a notable pivot from their sole focus on superconducting qubits. If you care about qday, i.e. the day a quantum computer will break the first piece of cryptography in production, neutral atoms demand your attention. I shared some of my learnings on Shor and neutral atoms in a 30min talk at the ZKProof cryptography conference. You can find it on YouTube by searching "zkproof neutral atom".

Here's an interesting observation about this duo of breakthrough papers: neither Google nor Oratomic say a word about what their results mean for qday. No timelines. Zero. Nada. That is especially baffling given that the whole point of whitehat quantum cryptanalysis is to inform qday estimations and help the general public make good decisions.

So let me attempt to partially fill the silence, similarly to what Scott Aaronson did in his April 29 post. Given everything I know, including scary non-public information, I now put the odds of qday by 2032 at 50%. 10% by 2030.

Anecdotally, the US government has its own date: 2035. Originating at the NSA and later adopted by NIST, it's when branches of the US government will be disallowed from using quantum-vulnerable cryptography. In plain language: with hindsight, that date is a joke and should be discounted entirely. I don't see how NIST avoids being forced to pull it forward by years.

Part 3: post-quantum cryptography

There are good reasons to sound the alarm today, but please do not panic. Rushing carelessly towards immature post-quantum cryptography is a recipe for disaster. IMO a good target date for migration is 2029, roughly 3.5 years out. 2029 happens to be the date selected by Google, Cloudflare, and the Ethereum Foundation.

These days most of my time goes to safely migrating Ethereum towards post-quantum cryptography as part of the broader lean Ethereum effort. There's a lot to do. We need to rip out and replace BLS signatures at the consensus layer, KZG commitments at the data layer, and ECDSA signatures at the execution layer.

The plan to get there is compelling, and is based on hash-based cryptography. Within the Ethereum Foundation we've developed a Swiss army knife called leanVM (github[.]com/leanEthereum/leanVM) powered by the magic of hash-based SNARKs. Thanks to truly exceptional work by Emile, Thomas, and others, its performance is derisked. Regarding security, leanVM is a jewel, a minimal zkVM crafted for end-to-end formal verification and maximum security.

Want to help? There are two $1M initiatives. First, the Proximity Prize (proximityprize[.]org). Solve a long-standing mathematical conjecture in coding theory, improve hash-based SNARKs, and go home a millionaire. Second, the Poseidon Initiative (poseidon-initiative[.]info), offers $1M for breaking Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function.

[OpenMatter @OpenMatter_]

@drakefjustin Yes, rushing to upgrade to post-quantum secure pipelines and tools could easily lead to poor implementations. But at the enterprise level these things take time. Also, HNDL is an active threat.

Large corps need to start testing PQC environments sooner rather than later.

[OpenMatter @OpenMatter_]

Compute border controls are solidifying into procurement law. Authorities will demand undeniable proof of where and how workloads execute. Our Datavizor interface generates verifiable cryptographic receipts for every action.

Don't trust data. Prove it. 5/5

[OpenMatter @OpenMatter_]

The market is waiting for dedicated AI regulations to be finalized, but the regulatory hammer is already swinging.

Privacy regulators are using existing data protection laws to govern AI today. If you’re waiting for an AI Act to build compliance, you’re missing the boat. 1/5

[OpenMatter @OpenMatter_]

Enter QuantumGuard, a Zero-Knowledge Firewall for the agentic economy. It forces autonomous systems to mathematically prove compliance with enterprise policies before execution.

We replace assumption based trust with absolute physics. The math clears before the action runs. 4/5

[OpenMatter @OpenMatter_]

As AI agents interact autonomously with enterprise infrastructure at scale, security must become part of the compute layer itself.

That is exactly what we are building at OpenMatter: replacing "trust" with mathematical certainty to secure the agentic economy.

[OpenMatter @OpenMatter_]

The new guidance from CISA, the NSA, and the Five Eyes on Agentic AI gets the diagnosis right, but the prescription wrong.

Autonomous AI breaks traditional security models. But you cannot secure machine-speed autonomy with human-speed oversight.

[Conventus Law @conventuslaw]

US – American And Allied Cyber Agencies Issue First Joint Guidance On Securing Agentic AI. https://t.co/14MJeh4v2f

[OpenMatter @OpenMatter_]

This is why AI security must evolve from software guardrails to absolute logic.

Sensitive data cannot exist as plaintext in memory, and execution policies cannot rely on trust alone. We don't need better audit trails. We need cryptographic proof at the exact point of action.

[OpenMatter @OpenMatter_]

This discovery may be a couple months old, but the lesson is timeless. Protect your agents via OpenMatter MPC threshold decryption to eliminate credential theft

[Cyber Security News @The_Cyber_News]

🚨 OpenClaw Chain Vulnerabilities Expose 245,000 Public AI Agent Servers to Attack

Source: https://t.co/Hn3a2KocG5

A chain of four critical vulnerabilities discovered in OpenClaw, one of the fastest-growing open-source platforms for autonomous AI agents, has left an estimated 245,000 publicly accessible server instances exposed to remote exploitation, credential theft, and persistent backdoor installation.

Shodan and ZoomEye scans as of May 2026 reveal approximately 65,000 and 180,000 publicly accessible OpenClaw instances, respectively, totaling roughly 245,000 exposed servers. What makes this chain especially dangerous is that the attacker weaponizes the AI agent’s own privileges.

#cybersecuritynews

[OpenMatter @OpenMatter_]

@IntCyberDigest Probabilistic guardrails are not sufficient

[OpenMatter @OpenMatter_]

The "Mini Shai-Hulud" attack on TanStack NPM packages just proved that standard software provenance is fundamentally broken. If an attacker controls your CI runner, they control your attestations. Policy based security is failing at scale. 🧵

[OpenMatter @OpenMatter_]

OpenMatter enables confidential, verifiable queries over RAG databases using secure multi-party computation. Get pooled insights across untrusted environments without sharing raw data.

Learn how we secure agentic workflows here:
https://t.co/vJeWthocbO

[OpenMatter @OpenMatter_]

Centralized RAG databases are the new enterprise honeypots. You should not have to pool your raw data into a central server just to extract insights from it. That is insight with compromise. There is a secure way to run collaborative data analysis. 🧵

[OpenMatter @OpenMatter_]

It is time to shift from software promises to verifiable mathematical execution. OpenMatter's ZK Firewall ensures no high risk action occurs without a Zero-Knowledge Proof.

Learn how we are securing the agentic web:

https://t.co/Cqi6YjFLze

[OpenMatter @OpenMatter_]

The "Mini Shai-Hulud" attack on TanStack NPM packages just proved that standard software provenance is fundamentally broken. If an attacker controls your CI runner, they control your attestations. Policy based security is failing at scale. 🧵

[Socket @SocketSecurity]

🚨 UPDATE: Mini Shai-Hulud has crossed from @npmjs into @pypi and is still spreading.

Newly confirmed compromised artifacts:

@​opensearch-project/opensearch: 3.5.3, 3.6.2, 3.7.0, 3.8.0 (1.3M weekly downloads)

mistralai: 2.4.6 on PyPI

guardrails-ai: 0.10.1 on PyPI

additional @​squawk/* packages on npm

guardrails-ai 0.10.1 executes malicious code on import. On Linux, it downloads git-tanstack[.]com/transformers.​pyz, writes it to /tmp/transformers.​pyz, and runs it with python3 without integrity verification.

The git-tanstack.​com domain displayed a message signed “With Love TeamPCP,” along with: “We've been online over 2 hours now stealing creds
Regardless I just came to say hello :^)”

The page also linked to a YouTube video and you can probably guess which one.

[OpenMatter @OpenMatter_]

The most alarming detail? The worm hijacked .claude hooks to establish persistence. Developer AI assistants are becoming autonomous exfiltration nodes. We must govern agentic workflows with cryptographic execution, not just basic software sandboxes.

[OpenMatter @OpenMatter_]

Legacy banking systems were not built for agentic payments.

OpenMatter provides cryptographic gating and audit trails for every transaction. We generate zero knowledge receipts so financial institutions can prove regulatory compliance without putting your funds at risk.