PakCrypt.Org

PakCrypt Community exists to develop people who can design, analyze, and prove cryptographic systems.
As Pythagoras said in 500BCE "Number rules the universe."

[PakCrypt.Org @PakCryptOrg]

🔐 2 competition tracks (Pro and Amo)
🏆 Rs. 7M+ total prizes in Crypto Competition, CTF and Ideas Cup
🌍 12+ International experts
🎓 IACR Cryptography Winter School
📍 NCCS, Air University, Islamabad
📅 24–27 Nov 2026
The first round is open online now.
Can you crack it?
👉 https://t.co/VKdKRXrRMz

#Cryptography #CyberSecurityPakistan
#CyberSecurity #InfoSec #Cryptography #CyberSecurityPakistan #Encryption
#PQC #Quantum #CyberDefense #DigitalForensics
#EthicalHacking #OSINT #NetworkSecurity
#ApplicationSecurity

[PakCrypt.Org @PakCryptOrg]

🚨The nightmare scenario for Web PKI just dropped:
🚨zero-entropy RSA keygen compromised intermediate CAs, letting researchers factor private keys straight out of public logs.
https://t.co/WxGWStAyLV
---
Regulatory & Exchange Disclosures
eMudhra Limited Regulatory Filing to NSE & BSE (Filed October 21, 2026)
Significance: Formal corporate statement submitted by eMudhra to the National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) and Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) acknowledging the cryptographic failure, initiating revocation protocols for affected intermediates, and announcing the migration of 30,000 active customer certificates to unaffected RSA hierarchies.

---
In nutshell, If you think your TLS connection is safe just because a site has a valid HTTPS cert, think again.

Here is the technical post-mortem on how a cryptographic entropy flaw broke intermediate trust boundaries:

1️⃣ The PRNG Failure: During key derivation for eMudhra intermediate CAs, an entropy starvation bug in their key generation pipeline caused predictable prime generation when deriving RSA moduli.

2️⃣ The CT Log OSINT: Because Certificate Transparency (CT) logs mandate public exposure of all certificates, researchers scraped public keys from CT logs and ran automated Batch GCD (Greatest Common Divisor) and Coppersmith lattice reduction attacks across the corpus.

3️⃣ Private Key Recovery: When two RSA moduli share a single prime factor p, computing p = gcd(N1, N2) takes microseconds. The randomness failure created shared prime factors across 8 intermediate CA keys, enabling complete private key reconstruction.

4️⃣ Arbitrary Domain Impersonation: Owning an intermediate CA private key means you ARE the Certificate Authority. An adversary with these keys could mint fully valid X.509 leaf certificates for ANY domain on earth without triggering domain validation or DNS challenges.

Takeaways for AppSec & Cryptographic Engineers:
• Bad PRNGs will cook your entire security boundary faster than any zero-day exploit.
• Monitor Certificate Transparency logs 24/7 for unauthorized cert issuances on your domain.
• Validate hardware entropy sources before initiating high-level cryptographic key generation.
Randomness isn't optional—it's the foundation of the whole stack. 🧵🔒
#CyberSecurity #Infosec #Cryptography #PKI #AppSec #OSINT

[PakCrypt.Org @PakCryptOrg]

MYKHAILO FEDOROV: THE DIGITAL STRATEGIST WHO HELPED TURN UKRAINE INTO A TECHNOLOGY-DRIVEN WAR MACHINE 🇺🇦💻

What happens when a digital marketer enters government, builds a national digital platform, mobilises hundreds of thousands of online participants during a war, helps secure satellite connectivity for an embattled military, and champions drones as a central instrument of warfare?

Meet Mykhailo Fedorov.

Unlike a conventional military commander or intelligence officer, Fedorov's rise came through digital government, technology policy, and the mobilisation of civilian technical talent. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine transformed those skills into instruments of national defence.

Here is the story—and what cybersecurity professionals, software engineers, and military technologists can learn from it.

1. WHO IS MYKHAILO FEDOROV?

Fedorov was born in 1991 in Vasylivka, in southern Ukraine. Before becoming internationally known, he worked in marketing and digital communications.

His political breakthrough came in 2019, when he helped run Volodymyr Zelenskyy's successful presidential social-media campaign.

After Zelenskyy's victory, Fedorov entered government as Minister of Digital Transformation. At the time, he was one of the youngest members of the cabinet.

His original mission was not to wage cyberwar. It was to modernise government, digitise public services, reduce bureaucracy, and make technology a practical part of everyday life.

Then February 2022 arrived.

The same digital capabilities that had been used to transform public administration became relevant to a much more urgent problem: how to keep a country connected, mobilise technical expertise, and sustain a technologically sophisticated defence under invasion.

https://t.co/leNdfWGi2t

2. DIiA: THE STATE IN A SMARTPHONE

Before examining the cyberwarfare story, it is worth understanding the digital-government project that established Fedorov's reputation.

Under his leadership, Ukraine developed Diia, a digital platform that allows citizens to access a range of government services through their smartphones.

Its purpose was to reduce dependence on paper documents, physical offices, and traditional administrative processes.

This is more significant than it may initially appear.

Digital government requires identity management, secure authentication, data integration, service availability, privacy protections, and resilient infrastructure. It also requires institutions to redesign their processes rather than simply put old paperwork on a screen.

A successful digital public-service platform becomes part of a country's critical infrastructure.

During a national emergency, the ability to communicate with citizens and maintain access to essential services becomes even more important.

Diia was not created as a military weapon. But it demonstrated an important principle: a population accustomed to using digital public services is already operating within a technology-enabled civic ecosystem.

3. FEBRUARY 26, 2022: THE BIRTH OF THE IT ARMY OF UKRAINE
Four days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Fedorov announced the creation of a volunteer IT Army.

His appeal was direct: Ukraine needed digital talent, and people with technical skills could contribute to the fight online.

The announcement linked volunteers to a Telegram channel where cyber-operation tasks were published.

The model was unusual.

Instead of relying exclusively on a small number of government cyber specialists, Ukraine opened a channel through which a much larger population of technically capable volunteers could participate in cyber operations.

The IT Army subsequently targeted Russian government websites, financial services, commercial organisations, and other online infrastructure.

Distributed denial-of-service attacks, or DDoS, became one of its principal methods. These attacks attempt to overwhelm a service with traffic, making it unavailable or difficult to access.

The initiative attracted enormous attention. According to research published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), its Telegram channel reached approximately 300,000 members by March 2022.

That figure needs careful interpretation: channel membership does not equal 300,000 active operators, and participation did not imply equal technical expertise.

Nevertheless, the initiative demonstrated how quickly a government-backed call for technical volunteers could attract international participation during a major conflict.

https://t.co/8ughUIIQNg

Independent analysis — CSIS:
https://t.co/4EaLIzQ68L

4. THE IT ARMY WAS NOT A MAGICAL ARMY OF ELITE HACKERS
This distinction matters, especially to cybersecurity professionals.

The IT Army's most visible activities were often DDoS attacks, not sophisticated cryptanalysis or the covert exploitation of previously unknown software vulnerabilities.
A DDoS attack can disrupt access to a website or online service. It does not necessarily compromise the underlying system, obtain privileged access, or extract confidential information.

Nor does an outage automatically establish the operational or strategic importance of an attack.

The IT Army's significance lies partly in its organisational model: a publicly coordinated volunteer ecosystem, with target selection and tools distributed through online channels.

Researchers have documented a mixture of denial-of-service attacks, defacement, doxing, and reported data leaks. They have also noted that the initiative's operations and relationships with Ukrainian state institutions are not always straightforward to assess from public information.

This raises difficult questions about effectiveness, attribution, civilian participation, escalation, and the legal status of cyber operations conducted by volunteers.

A technically honest assessment must acknowledge those questions.

Fedorov's contribution was not that he personally invented a new hacking technique. It was that he helped turn digital participation into an organised component of wartime mobilisation.

https://t.co/GrWnEGtOWP

5. STARLINK: CONNECTIVITY BECOMES A MILITARY CAPABILITY

One of Fedorov's most visible interventions came in the early days of the invasion, when he publicly appealed to Elon Musk to activate Starlink satellite internet service over Ukraine.

The request was answered, and Starlink terminals subsequently became widely used in Ukraine, including by military units.

Why was this important?
Modern military operations depend on communications for command and control, situational awareness, coordination, intelligence sharing, and the transmission of information from the battlefield.

Traditional communications infrastructure can be damaged, disrupted, or rendered inaccessible during war.

Satellite connectivity can provide an alternative path, although it is not invulnerable to jamming, interference, service restrictions, or physical disruption.

Starlink was not a system Fedorov designed, and he did not independently create its underlying technology. His role was in recognising an urgent operational need, making the request publicly, and helping secure access to a commercial technology that Ukraine could put to use.

That is a different kind of technical contribution: connecting an existing technology to an immediate national requirement at scale.

The episode also illustrates a broader dependency in modern warfare. A nation's military communications may rely partly on commercial infrastructure operated by a private company outside its direct control.

That creates questions about resilience, governance, continuity of service, and strategic autonomy.

https://t.co/leNdfWGi2t

6. THE ARMY OF DRONES: FROM TECHNOLOGY POLICY TO THE BATTLEFIELD

Fedorov also became a prominent advocate of Ukraine's Army of Drones initiative.

The programme sought to expand the country's capacity to acquire, produce, and operate unmanned aerial vehicles for military purposes.

Drones had already demonstrated their military value before 2022. The invasion accelerated their adoption and the pace of technological adaptation.

Small unmanned systems can support reconnaissance, surveillance, artillery correction, and attack missions. Their effectiveness depends on much more than the aircraft itself: operators, communications, sensors, software, navigation, training, logistics, and the ability to adapt under electronic warfare pressure all matter.
The result is a rapid technological competition.

As one side improves its drones, the other develops countermeasures. As communications links become vulnerable to jamming, designers explore alternative control methods, navigation systems, and levels of autonomy.

The drone is only one component of a much larger system.

Fedorov helped promote the institutional and financial mechanisms intended to expand Ukraine's drone ecosystem. This included the Army of Drones initiative and efforts to encourage domestic defence-technology development.

The achievement should not be confused with personally inventing the drones or independently directing their battlefield use. His role was in helping mobilise resources, policy, industry, and organisational attention around the technology.

7. BRAVE1: BUILDING A DEFENCE-TECHNOLOGY ECOSYSTEM

Another important development was Brave1, launched in 2023 as a Ukrainian defence-technology cluster.

The objective was to bring together defence institutions, technology developers, investors, and other participants to accelerate the development and deployment of military technologies.

This is an important shift from treating defence innovation as the exclusive responsibility of large, established contractors.

In a rapidly evolving conflict, smaller firms and engineering teams may be able to develop and adapt particular technologies quickly. But they need access to funding, testing, users, procurement pathways, and feedback from the field.

A functioning innovation ecosystem attempts to connect those pieces.
Ukraine's defence-tech activity has covered drones, electronic warfare, robotics, communications, and other capabilities. Brave1 has provided a mechanism for supporting and coordinating parts of that ecosystem.

The broader lesson is familiar to anyone working in engineering: innovation is not just the invention of a good product. It requires a system that can repeatedly move ideas from prototypes into real operational use.

The Ukrainian government has reported substantial growth in the number of companies and solutions associated with Brave1. Those figures are official programme statistics, not independent measurements of the battlefield effectiveness of every supported technology.

Ukraine's Ministry of Defence:
https://t.co/6TPjNBrNOA

8. THE DATA-DRIVEN BATTLEFIELD

Fedorov's technology agenda increasingly emphasised the collection and use of operational data.

One example was the development of incentive systems in which verified battlefield results could earn points redeemable for equipment.

The idea was to connect operational activity, digital records, and the allocation of resources.

Conceptually, this resembles a feedback loop:

Observe → Record → Verify → Analyse → Allocate → Improve.

Such systems can help decision-makers identify demand and channel resources. They can also create new risks.
Measurements are not the same as reality. Incentives may encourage people to optimise the metric rather than the mission. Video verification can be incomplete, and the availability of recorded evidence may differ between units or types of operation.

A data-driven military must therefore care about data quality, verification, security, incentives, and the consequences of its measurement system.

Collecting battlefield data is not inherently the same as understanding the battlefield.

The challenge is to turn data into better decisions without allowing the data itself to distort the behaviour being measured.

https://t.co/leNdfWGi2t

9. FROM DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION TO MINISTER OF DEFENCE

In January 2026, Ukraine's parliament appointed Fedorov as Minister of Defence.

This was a significant transition: the former digital-transformation minister was now responsible for a ministry dealing with the enormous human, operational, industrial, and organisational demands of a prolonged war.

His stated priorities included military reform, digitalisation, greater use of technology, and changes to the organisation and support of the armed forces.

His appointment reflected the importance Ukrainian leaders placed on technological adaptation and defence innovation.

But it also exposed the limits of a technology-centred approach.

Military effectiveness depends on trained personnel, logistics, leadership, force structure, procurement, morale, and the ability to sustain operations. Software and drones cannot independently resolve problems involving manpower, institutional trust, or command relationships.

Fedorov's tenure also involved disagreements over strategy and procurement, and criticism of aspects of his proposed reforms. Reuters reported that he was dismissed in July 2026, after roughly six months in the position.
His record should therefore be examined as a developing and contested chapter in Ukraine's military transformation—not as a story of unqualified success.

10. WHAT CAN CYBERSECURITY PROFESSIONALS LEARN FROM HIS STORY?

There are at least five lessons worth considering.

First: mobilisation is a capability.

A country may possess talented security researchers, software engineers, network specialists, and systems administrators without having a mechanism to coordinate them in a crisis.

Fedorov's IT Army initiative showed how digital channels could mobilise volunteers at extraordinary speed. It also exposed the governance and accountability problems that arise when civilian participation intersects with offensive cyber operations.

Second: technology matters when it solves an operational problem.

Starlink was valuable not because satellite internet was a new invention, but because connectivity was urgently needed. The relevant capability was the combination of technology, access, deployment, and operational adoption.

Third: resilience is more than cybersecurity.

A resilient digital state needs secure systems, reliable communications, alternative infrastructure, continuity planning, and the ability to continue operating under disruption.
Fourth: innovation requires institutions.

The Army of Drones and Brave1 illustrate attempts to connect engineers, funding, procurement, military users, and operational feedback. Innovation without deployment is just a prototype.

Fifth: data and automation need sound governance.

Digital systems can improve coordination and resource allocation, but they also introduce risks involving inaccurate data, misaligned incentives, privacy, security, and excessive confidence in metrics.

These lessons are relevant far beyond Ukraine.

They apply to national cyber defence, critical infrastructure, emergency response, military communications, and the development of secure digital public services.

****THE BIGGER PICTURE****

Mykhailo Fedorov did not become prominent because he broke a famous cipher or discovered a revolutionary vulnerability.

His story is about something different: the use of digital platforms, networks of people, commercial technology, and innovation institutions to expand a country's ability to respond to war.

His career also demonstrates that cyberwarfare is not synonymous with hacking.

The digital dimension of a conflict includes communications, government services, industrial innovation, intelligence support, software, satellite connectivity, unmanned systems, data, and the people who make those capabilities work together.

A cyber operation may take a website offline. A resilient digital ecosystem can help a country keep functioning under attack.

Those are different kinds of power.

And in a prolonged conflict, both can become part of the wider contest.

#CyberSecurity #CyberWarfare #Ukraine #DigitalTransformation #DefenceTech #ITArmy

[PakCrypt.Org @PakCryptOrg]

Quantum error correction just took a massive leap, and the timer on RSA-2048 just ticked significantly faster.

For years, the biggest meme in quantum computing has been noisy physical qubits. You can't break RSA-2048 with noisy qubits—Shor’s algorithm requires thousands of ultra-clean logical qubits protected by Quantum Error Correction (QEC).

On October 19, 2026, Quantinuum’s trapped-ion processor (Helios) set a world record by dropping the logical error rate to $5 \times 10^{-6}$ per round ($99.9995\%$ logical fidelity).

How they did it?

1️⃣ Distance-7 Color Code Architecture: Instead of standard surface codes, Helios implemented a triangular distance-7 color code using 73 barium-137 ions per logical block.

2️⃣ Incredible Suppression Factor (12x): In QEC, as you increase code distance, errors should scale down exponentially. Helios achieved an error suppression factor of 12 between distances—crushing previous benchmarks (like Google Willow’s 2.14 suppression factor) by roughly $290\times$ lower logical error at distance 7.

3️⃣ Mid-Circuit AI Decoding: Ion leakage into non-qubit states usually destroys quantum memory. Quantinuum solved this with optical repumping and real-time neural network decoders running inference in sub-millisecond windows—faster than the syndrome extraction cycle itself.

⚡ The Cryptographic Reality Check:Why does a $10\times$ error rate reduction matter? Shor's algorithm for breaking RSA-2048 and ECC isn't limited by physical qubit counts alone; it’s constrained by physical-to-logical overhead and error accumulation during multi-billion gate depth circuits.

Shrinking logical error rates by an order of magnitude accelerates the fault-tolerant timeline, bringing target hardware milestones directly into the late-2020s window.

If your stack hasn't mapped out its transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography (ML-KEM / ML-DSA), you are already running on borrowed time ⏳ core encryption isn't a "2035 problem" anymore.

#QuantumComputing #Cryptography #CyberSecurity #OSINT #InfoSec #QuantumThreat

[PakCrypt.Org @PakCryptOrg]

When people talk about AI, they usually talk about LLMs, GPUs, and neural networks. But another fundamental question is often overlooked:

How should intelligent systems make decisions when people have competing interests?

Haris Aziz, Professor of Computer Science at UNSW Sydney, Australia, works on precisely this problem.
https://t.co/QrC6NFZzND

_____________________
His research sits at the intersection of AI, algorithms, game theory, and computational social choice. The goal: develop mathematical methods that help people and intelligent systems cooperate, allocate resources, and make better collective decisions.

1/ The mathematics of fair decisions

Imagine allocating university seats, distributing public resources, assigning tasks to robots, or deciding how a limited public budget should be spent.

Everyone has different preferences. Resources are limited. One person's gain may come at another's expense.

How do you design a system that is efficient without being unfair?

This isn't merely a philosophical question. It is an algorithmic problem involving formal definitions of fairness, mathematical guarantees, and computational complexity.

Aziz's research helps establish when desirable outcomes are possible, how to compute them, and what trade-offs arise when competing fairness requirements cannot all be satisfied.

2/ Making AI agents cooperate

As AI systems become more autonomous, they increasingly need to coordinate with other agents rather than operate in isolation.

Think robots coordinating a mission, autonomous systems sharing resources, or software agents negotiating over competing objectives.

Game theory studies strategic interactions. Algorithmic game theory asks how to turn those insights into computational procedures.

Aziz has collaborated with the US Air Force and Australian Defence Force on algorithms enabling robots to cooperate and accomplish tasks in distributed settings.

This connects rigorous theoretical computer science with real-world multi-agent coordination.

3/ Fairness in resource allocation

Consider dividing work, distributing goods, or allocating scarce resources among people with different needs.

A mathematically attractive allocation may still leave someone feeling unfairly treated.

One important concept is envy-freeness: broadly, no participant should prefer another person's allocation to their own.

In a 2021 paper published at AAAI, Aziz studied conditions under which allocations can achieve both envy-freeness and equitable treatment when monetary transfers are permitted.

The work also develops algorithms for computing approximately envy-free outcomes.

Fairness cannot simply be added to a system as a slogan. It must be defined precisely, tested against competing objectives, and translated into algorithms that actually run.

4/ Turning democratic preferences into algorithms

How should a community choose projects when its budget cannot fund everything?

How do you ensure that collective decisions reflect the interests of groups rather than simply favouring the most popular individual choices?

Aziz's work on computational social choice examines the algorithmic foundations of voting, representation, and collective decision-making.

In 2024, he co-authored Fair Lotteries for Participatory Budgeting, published in the proceedings of AAAI.

The research investigates randomized approaches to allocating public budgets while pursuing fairness guarantees both before and after outcomes are realized.

This is a striking example of theoretical computer science meeting democratic decision-making: formal guarantees can help us reason about how limited public money is distributed.

The bigger picture
For Pakistan, his trajectory is also a valuable example of what sustained mathematical and computational research can contribute to the international scientific community.

Not every consequential AI researcher builds a chatbot. Some help develop the mathematical foundations for how intelligent systems and people make decisions together.

#AI #ComputerScience #Pakistan #GameTheory #Algorithms

[PakCrypt.Org @PakCryptOrg]

Post-quantum cryptography was on track to destroy TLS performance—until now.

Replacing classical ECDSA with NIST's post-quantum signature standard (ML-DSA-44 / FIPS 204) inflates TLS 1.3 handshake signature payloads by up to 40× (2,420 bytes vs. 64 bytes).
Stack a multi-level X.509 certificate chain on top, and network packet fragmentation degrades latency across the entire Web PKI.Cloudflare’s production deployment of Merkle Tree Certificates (MTCs) completely re-architects how edge servers prove identity to clients.

Here is the technical breakdown of how it works:
1️⃣ The Architecture Shift: Instead of serving verbose X.509 certificate chains during every handshake, MTCs aggregate issued certificates into a central append-only Merkle tree.

2️⃣ Signed Tree Heads (STHs): The Certificate Authority periodically signs only the root hash—the STH—which clients maintain and update out-of-band.

3️⃣ $\mathcal{O}(\log N)$ Proof Compression: During the TLS 1.3 key exchange, the server presents only a compact Merkle inclusion proof verifying its slot in the active tree.

4️⃣ Payload Elimination: The handshake proof stays strictly under 1 KB, entirely bypassing multi-KB PQC cert chain bloat.

The Result? Real-world telemetry across billions of Chrome sessions demonstrated a 9% reduction in median TLS handshake latency compared to classical X.509 chains.Merkle Tree Certificates prove that transitioning to Post-Quantum Cryptography doesn't have to mean sacrificing global edge speed. 🧵🔒

#Cryptography #CyberSecurity #PostQuantum #TLS #WebPKI #Cloudflare

[PakCrypt.Org @PakCryptOrg]

@QtonicQuantum yep . an iOS device offering X25519MLKEM768 doesn't mean the server selected it. so don't count algorithms. Verify the handshake.

[PakCrypt.Org @PakCryptOrg]

@greyskullface00 @joerogan Cryptography is math. Security is the entire system.

[PakCrypt.Org @PakCryptOrg]

@AptosLabs @Aptos Yes. Threshold crypto can change the MEV game. But the real test is collusion resistance, liveness, and who controls the decryption threshold.

[PakCrypt.Org @PakCryptOrg]

@moulidorai @thedeepakk12 @grok @vikasjkn @ZohoVault yes, But closed source still asks users to trust what they cannot independently inspect.

[PakCrypt.Org @PakCryptOrg]

@MyBearNinja @drtodd234 @LouisvilleGun Meshtastic supports it, but the default channel key is public, packet headers remain visible, and channel encryption lacks authentication by default.

[PakCrypt.Org @PakCryptOrg]

@signalonoise Good checklist, but one crypto correction: modern Android devices are encrypted by default, and a factory reset normally destroys the decryption keys.

[PakCrypt.Org @PakCryptOrg]

@cyber_rekk Yes. The reality is once an agency's crafted 0-day malware owns your device, the strongest cipher in the world becomes irrelevant.

[PakCrypt.Org @PakCryptOrg]

@pete_rizzo_ The weakest link isn’t always the encryption. It’s the human holding the keys. 🔑
AI doesn’t need to break cryptography. The real attack surface is trust.

[PakCrypt.Org @PakCryptOrg]

@Itsfoss Encryption backdoors don’t come with a “good guys only” guarantee. sovereignty means little if citizens’ privacy depends on another country’s restraint.

[PakCrypt.Org @PakCryptOrg]

🚨 The hidden danger in Pakistan's new 5G cores isn't the radio. It's the control plane.

💰📡 Context:**
Pakistan's first 5G auction closed in March 2026 - $507M raised.
Jazz, Ufone & Zong are now building brand-new 5G cores for 201M subscribers.

Everyone is looking at towers and handsets.
The real risk sits *inside* the core.

---

🔄 🏗️ The Architectural Shift That Changed Everything**

5G killed the old closed signalling.
The core is now a Service-Based Architecture.

AMF, SMF, UDM, AUSF, NRF, PCF... are all microservices talking over HTTP/2 + JSON, authenticated by OAuth 2.0 tokens from the NRF.

👾 The consequence:**
A compromised or rogue Network Function can send requests that are syntactically perfect but semantically hostile.

> Register a fake function
> De-register subscribers
> Read subscription data
> Tear down sessions
> Poison service discovery

Traffic looks 100% legitimate because it *follows the spec*.

---

💥 🧨 The Cores Are Already Fragile**

- CoreCrisis found 13 crashing vulns across open + commercial cores, including auth bypass and billing fraud.
- iFinder [2026 multi-agent audit] found 84 unknown vulns in 7 open-source cores - 81 CVEs - including session hijacking confirmed on a real commercial core.
- State actors are already in telecom: CISA AA25-239A [Aug 2025] documented Salt Typhoon geolocating subscribers and recording calls.

---

🧱 Why Current Detection Fails - 4 Structural Problems:**

**1️⃣ Datasets are single-implementation.**
Public traces = free5GC or PFCP DoS only. 5G-NIDD covers radio/user-plane, not the SBI. No multi-core, leave-one-implementation-out dataset exists.

**2️⃣ Detectors don't transfer.**
Supervised NIDS models lose ~56% F1 when moved to another dataset. They learn implementation artefacts, not the attack. Pakistan runs mixed-vendor networks and will swap vendors over a license life - but cross-implementation transfer has never been measured.

**3️⃣ Learned detectors are evadable.**
On 5G core PFCP, models with clean AUC 1.000 can be fully evaded by genetic-algorithm perturbations.

**4️⃣ The standard itself has a blind spot.**
3GPP NWDAF abnormal-behaviour analytics [TS 23.288] defines exceptions like "suspected DDoS" and "too-frequent service access" - all centered on User Equipment. There is NO exception for a misbehaving Network Function.

Operators buy signalling protection as closed boxes. Pakistan has no domestic means to independently test them.

Detection is unsolved. Datasets don't exist. Standards don't cover the threat. And attackers are already inside.

**🛡️ That is the problem SpecGuard-5GC is trying to solve.**

#5G #Pakistan #TelecomSecurity #5GCore #SpecGuard5GC

[PakCrypt.Org @PakCryptOrg]

🚨 THE RADIO THE US INTEL AGENCY COULD READ BEFORE IT WAS EVEN SOLD

A forensic teardown of a real Cold War backdoor. And why it matters today.

1/ WHAT WAS THE UA-8295?

In 1984, Dutch company USFA (Philips) sold the UA-8295 Short Burst Terminal - a military field radio for short-wave.

Under the hood it was a Nokia device that originally used DES.
But from 1977, NSA had a deal with USFA: supply a WEAKER version to foreign customers.

It was sold to Belgium, UK, and a version with Arabic keyboard to Saudi Arabia.
From outside it looked identical. Same version number, same UI, even same checksum.

The paper by Maatje & Stevens (CWI) is the FIRST public reverse-engineer of it.
https://t.co/S6XBi35qEM

2/ THE BACKDOOR CONJECTURE - A NEW FORENSIC TOOL

The authors propose a simple idea to catch backdoors:

Conjecture: A backdoor has 2 goals:
(i) optimize a SECRET attack
(ii) look secure under casual review

So every design choice is either:
Class (i) = tuned for the attack
Class (ii) = tuned to look normal

If we guess the attack, Class (i) choices should be weirdly OPTIMAL.
That optimality is evidence. This is their forensic methodology.

3/ HOW WAS IT BACKDOORED? NOT BY CUTTING KEY BITS.

No simple "56-bit -> 40-bit" trick. It's sneakier.

Inside is a custom cipher called SBTcipher:
56-bit key, 64-bit block, 8 rounds
Rounds = BiP -> Mix -> ByP (byte permute) -> NS -> SB

Two killer flaws:

(i3) Weak Mixing:
Mix only mixes a nibble with another nibble's crumb (2 bits) with prob 1/4, else does nothing.
Expected mixing per nibble:
E[Z_nibble] = (3/4 * 0) + (1/4 * 2) * (3/4) = 3/8 bits
Per full byte path (16 Mix calls):
E[Z_path] = 6 bits only!
So byte paths barely talk to each other.

(i5) The Big Interaction:
Each byte path uses 40 control bits, but only 19-25 UNIQUE key bits.
Table from paper:
Path 7: 24 bits, Path 6: 25 bits, Path 1: 19 bits ...

So 56-bit key splits into 8 small puzzles.

For a single path, expected candidate list size:
log2(E[|L_a|]) = U_a - 2
Example: U_1 = 19 -> |L_1| ~ 2^17 = 131k keys. Small!

4/ TWO ATTACKS - LAPTOP IN A WEEKEND

They built 2 practical key-recovery attacks needing just 1 known plaintext/ciphertext block:

A) List Merge Attack:
Generate list of valid partial keys per byte path, then merge lists where they agree on overlapping key bits.
After 5 paths merged, only 5 bits left -> brute force.
With likelihood sorting, median time drops 3x.

B) Branch-and-Prune Attack:
Depth-first search on key bits with constraint propagation. Keeps a domain for each nibble (0-15 values) and prunes when empty.
Memory: ~3 MiB. Could fit in a 640 KiB PC from the mid-80s.

Results on modern server (but would run on 1980s Cray):

0 extra pairs:
List Merge median ~12429 sec (~3.5h) + ~131 sec precomp
Branch-and-Prune median ~33311 sec (~9h)

1 extra pair:
List Merge: 20 sec
Branch-and-Prune: 179 sec

2 extra pairs:
List Merge: 0 sec
Branch-and-Prune: 7 sec

3 extra pairs: 2-5 seconds.

Translation: With just 2-3 short messages, NSA in the 80s could recover keys daily.

5/ FORENSIC TWIST: WAS IT INTENTIONAL?

They tested if the byte permutation ByP was chosen to be optimal for the attack.

Using cheap predictors an attacker would use in the 80s (M2 = sum of unique bits per path, M3 = max bits per path):
ByP_org is ranked 1/3435, 1/1462, 1/844, 1/485 across realistic sets. It is literally the #1 optimal choice.

But the constant IV? Choosing IV from max-prob-wrap class only speeds up attack by 1.25x. No strong structure. So IV was likely Class (ii) - just to look secure.

This matches the Backdoor Conjecture perfectly.

6/ WHY YOU SHOULD CARE - PRACTICAL IMPACT

a) This is NOT history. Same pattern seen in:
- Crypto AG / Operation RUBICON: CIA/BND read 96% of traffic from 120 countries for 50 years
- Dual-EC DRBG in RSA BSAFE (paid $10M by NSA)
- TETRA: police radios worldwide using TEA-1, TEA-3 backdoored in 2023
- Juniper: someone hijacked NSA's Dual-EC backdoor for themselves

b) It teaches real backdoor engineering:
Don't make key small - make mixing fail and make key schedule interact with permutation. Looks secure to casual audit.

c) It gives us a detection method:
Future audits of closed-source crypto can use this forensic optimality test.

Security isn't just about math being correct. It's about who designed it, why that permutation was chosen, and whether you can verify it.

#cryptography #infosec #backdoor #NSA #forensics

[PakCrypt.Org @PakCryptOrg]

ok fully homomorphic encryption is actual black magic and we're not talking about it enough

you can run ANY computation on data while it stays fully encrypted the whole time. you send encrypted data to a server, it does all the work, sends back an encrypted result, you decrypt it and it's exactly what you would have gotten if it ran on the raw data. the server never sees shit.

why this is huge:
- cloud computing where the cloud can't spy on you
- AI that can do inference on your private data without ever seeing it
- medical research where hospitals let you analyze patient data without ever giving you the decryption keys

untrusted servers processing sensitive data safely. that's the dream.

so why isn't everything using it?
because the math is cursed. it's all lattice-based cryptography, LWE and Ring-LWE problems. and every operation you do adds invisible noise to the ciphertext. do too much and the whole thing breaks and becomes undecryptable.

the fix is called bootstrapping - refreshing the ciphertext to remove noise WITHOUT ever decrypting it. implementing and optimizing that requires math intuition that normal software engineering just does not teach.
#CyberSecurity #CryptoCommunity #CryptoGems

[PakCrypt.Org @PakCryptOrg]

KYRYLO BUDANOV: THE SPYMASTER WHO HELPED CHANGE THE WAY WE UNDERSTAND MODERN WARFARE 🇺🇦

Most people know the faces of presidents and generals. Far fewer know the people who operate in the shadows, collecting intelligence, penetrating adversary networks, coordinating covert operations, and shaping what an enemy believes is happening.

Kyrylo Budanov became one of the most recognisable figures in Ukraine’s war against Russia by doing precisely this.

But who is he, and what has he actually contributed?

1. WHO IS KYRYLO BUDANOV?

Born in Kyiv on 4 January 1986, Budanov is a career Ukrainian military intelligence officer. He graduated from the Odesa Institute of the Ground Forces in 2007 and served in Ukraine’s military intelligence service, commonly known as HUR or GUR.

He became its chief in August 2020, more than 18 months before Russia launched its full-scale invasion.

He was not an intelligence celebrity at the time. His reputation developed through the war, as Ukraine’s intelligence service became increasingly associated with operations against Russian military capabilities, logistics, occupied territory, and strategic infrastructure.

Official appointment:
https://t.co/qiiKQklUVA

2. THE VALUE OF INTELLIGENCE BEFORE THE FIRST SHOT

One of the most consequential claims about Budanov’s work concerns Ukraine’s preparation for the invasion.

In a 2024 interview with The Telegraph, Budanov explained that human intelligence had provided advance information about Russia’s planned attack on 24 February 2022.

He made an important distinction: Ukraine could not have relied on electronic, radio, and cyber intelligence alone to reach the same conclusion in time.

This is a critical lesson in intelligence engineering.

SIGINT can reveal communications and electronic activity. Cyber intelligence can expose digital infrastructure and adversary operations. But HUMINT—human intelligence—can reveal intentions, plans, and decisions that may never appear in intercepted traffic.

No single intelligence discipline provides a complete picture. The real advantage comes from combining them.

https://t.co/qup82pRT98

3. TURNING MILITARY INTELLIGENCE INTO OPERATIONAL CAPABILITY
Under Budanov’s leadership, HUR expanded its combat and operational units, technical intelligence capabilities, and cyber-intelligence capacity.

In the same February 2024 interview, he described an increase in personnel, stronger analytical functions, and the introduction of AI-based services to process technical data.

This matters because intelligence is not simply the collection of information.

Its operational value depends on the entire chain:

Collection → Processing → Analysis → Assessment → Decision → Action.

A service can collect terabytes of intercepted communications, satellite imagery, and digital traces and still fail if it cannot distinguish meaningful signals from noise quickly enough.

Ukraine’s experience illustrates why intelligence organisations increasingly need technical collection, human sources, analytical expertise, automation, and operational forces working together.

It is not merely a question of possessing data. It is a question of converting information into decisions before the adversary can react.

4. OPERATIONS BEHIND ENEMY LINES

Budanov’s public reputation grew substantially through HUR’s reported covert and long-range operations against Russian military infrastructure.

These operations have targeted, or been attributed to Ukrainian intelligence in reporting about, military logistics, command structures, occupied Crimea, naval assets, and infrastructure supporting Russia’s war effort.

The October 2022 explosion on the Crimean Bridge became one of the most prominent examples. Russia accused Ukrainian intelligence of involvement; the incident was widely reported, and the bridge’s importance as a supply route made it strategically significant.

However, a distinction is essential: not every operation attributed to HUR has been independently verified, and the public record does not establish Budanov’s personal role in every attack.

The broader strategic point is that military intelligence can do more than inform conventional battlefield decisions. It can help identify vulnerabilities far from the front line and enable operations intended to disrupt an adversary’s logistics, freedom of movement, and sense of security.

https://t.co/nS3DGyqF6N

5. CRIMEA: INTELLIGENCE, SPECIAL OPERATIONS, AND STRATEGIC PRESSURE

Crimea has been central to Russia’s military posture since its 2014 occupation and annexation, which Ukraine and most of the international community reject.
It also became an important theatre for Ukrainian intelligence and special operations.

In a January 2024 profile, the Financial Times described Budanov’s role in operations behind Russian lines and in occupied Crimea. Budanov said Ukrainian units had repeatedly entered the peninsula during 2023, even though Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive had not achieved its broader territorial objectives.

These are not equivalent achievements: conducting raids and gathering intelligence in occupied territory is different from retaking and holding that territory.

Nevertheless, such operations can force an adversary to divert personnel, reinforce facilities, protect logistics, and reconsider assumptions about the security of areas it controls.

The strategic significance is not that every raid changes the front line. It is that an occupied territory may remain operationally contested even when the map barely changes.

https://t.co/RSWJOQZkI2

6. THE CYBER AND TECHNICAL INTELLIGENCE DIMENSION

Budanov’s story is especially relevant to cybersecurity and signals intelligence because it shows why modern intelligence cannot be reduced to HUMINT or traditional espionage.

HUR’s publicly described capabilities include cyber intelligence and technical intelligence, alongside human sources and combat operations.
Budanov said in 2024 that the service had strengthened its cyber-intelligence capacity and expanded the use of AI-assisted processing of technical information.

That does not mean HUR is publicly documented as having broken Russia’s major cryptographic systems. There is no sound basis for claiming that Budanov personally led a landmark cryptanalytic breakthrough.

The more defensible lesson is broader: technical intelligence becomes strategically powerful when it is integrated with human reporting, operational context, and timely analysis.

For anyone working in cryptography, secure communications, or national cyber defence, this is an important distinction. Encryption protects information in transit, but it cannot by itself eliminate intelligence gathered from human sources, compromised endpoints, traffic patterns, operational mistakes, or other sources outside the cryptographic algorithm.

7. INTELLIGENCE IS ALSO A BATTLE FOR PERCEPTION

Budanov has developed an unusually public profile for an intelligence chief.

In a 2023 Reuters interview, he argued that intelligence leaders could no longer remain entirely in the shadows. His public appearances and carefully worded statements became part of Ukraine’s wartime communications environment.

His reputation is partly built on secrecy: adversaries cannot easily know which operations Ukraine can conduct, which sources it possesses, or which capabilities it may be concealing.

But secrecy and public communication can coexist. An intelligence leader can reveal enough to influence an adversary’s calculations without revealing the underlying sources and methods.

This is strategic signalling: shaping expectations, imposing uncertainty, and potentially forcing an opponent to spend resources guarding against threats it cannot confidently assess.

There is a caveat. Public claims are not proof of intelligence success, and psychological effects are difficult to measure independently. Budanov’s image is a combination of documented institutional activity, public reporting, official messaging, and wartime mythmaking.

https://t.co/nS3DGyqF6N

8. THE HUMAN COST OF THE INTELLIGENCE WAR

Budanov’s career also illustrates the personal risks associated with intelligence work.

Reuters reported a failed 2019 car-bombing attempt targeting him. Later reporting described multiple alleged assassination attempts against him. In 2023, Ukrainian officials said his wife, Marianna Budanova, had been poisoned with heavy metals and received medical treatment.

These incidents should be understood in the context of the wider intelligence conflict between Russia and Ukraine, while distinguishing reported allegations from facts independently established in public.
The point is not to romanticise espionage. It is to recognise that intelligence officers can become direct targets in a conflict where information, sabotage, covert action, and political pressure are closely intertwined.

9. FROM SPY CHIEF TO THE CENTRE OF GOVERNMENT

Budanov’s influence eventually extended beyond military intelligence.

On 2 January 2026, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appointed him Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine. Oleh Ivashchenko took over as head of HUR.

The appointment reflected the Ukrainian leadership’s stated desire to place greater emphasis on security, defence, and the diplomatic track in negotiations.

It was a striking transition: a career intelligence officer moving from leading a military intelligence agency to a central position in the president’s office.

It also marks a different kind of test. Intelligence leadership and political administration demand overlapping but distinct skills. Whether Budanov can translate his wartime experience into effective political and diplomatic leadership is a separate question from his record at HUR.

https://t.co/gXy1jOK8zb

10. WHAT SHOULD WE LEARN FROM BUDANOV’S CAREER?

Three lessons stand out.

First, intelligence is a system, not a sensor. HUMINT, SIGINT, cyber intelligence, technical collection, analysis, and operational capabilities become far more valuable when they reinforce one another.

Second, strategic advantage does not always require defeating an adversary in a conventional engagement. Exposing vulnerabilities, disrupting logistics, collecting advance warning, and forcing defensive reallocations can all have operational consequences.

Third, information itself has become part of the battlespace. Intelligence organisations must protect sources and methods while communicating enough to influence adversaries, reassure partners, and sustain domestic confidence.
Budanov is not a cryptanalyst celebrity, nor should every reported covert operation be credited personally to him. His significance lies elsewhere: he became the public face of an intelligence organisation operating across human, technical, cyber, and kinetic domains during a major interstate war.

That is what makes his career worth studying.

The modern intelligence question is no longer simply, “What does the enemy know?”

It is also:

What can we discover before the enemy acts?
How quickly can we turn evidence into a decision?
Which adversary assumptions can we exploit?
And how do we preserve uncertainty for ourselves while creating it for the other side?

Kyrylo Budanov’s wartime career offers a compelling case study in those questions.

#Ukraine #Intelligence #CyberSecurity #SIGINT #MilitaryIntelligence

[PakCrypt.Org @PakCryptOrg]

You might have noticed that overt resistance to security practices is actively generated by psychological reactance !!!

When security mandates are perceived as arbitrary external constraints that threaten professional autonomy, highly competent personnel will instinctively oppose them. This opposition is a documented psychological response to lost agency; they view security processes as direct adversaries to their productivity.

The standard organizational reflex—responding to this resistance with increased enforcement and compliance pressure—is empirically counterproductive. Attempting to coerce compliance from a developer in this state actively deepens the reactance, entrenching the motivational opposition rather than resolving it.

You cannot mandate a developer out of psychological reactance.
________________________
The constructive resolution demands an autonomy-preserving process redesign, not heightened compliance pressure. To neutralize the resistance, organizations must completely abandon compliance-framing for this profile.

You must involve these developers directly in the architecture and configuration of the security workflows they are expected to use. Replace mandatory training tracks with developer-controlled, optional security activities.
By reframing security as a craft decision the developer controls rather than an obligation imposed from the outside, you return their professional agency, and the resistance dissolves.

[PakCrypt.Org @PakCryptOrg]

ok bilinear pairings sound like made-up math but they power some of the most useful crypto tricks we have

it's a function that takes two points on an elliptic curve and maps them to a point in a finite field, but it preserves the algebraic structure while doing it. basically it lets you do this magic multiplication between curves that shouldn't be possible.

why you should care:
this is the engine behind Identity-Based Encryption where your email address literally IS your public key. no certificate, no key lookup. and it's the foundation of BLS signatures where you can take thousands of separate digital signatures and aggregate them into ONE single verifiable signature. this is how modern decentralized networks do consensus without getting completely bottlenecked.

so why does no one understand it?
regular elliptic curve crypto is easy to visualize, it's just adding points on a curve. pairings are not. you need advanced algebraic geometry, Weil or Tate pairings, divisor theory over extension fields. it's so abstract that even seasoned cryptographers just treat pairings as a theoretical black box and hope it works.