Cyril Leclerc

Subnoto

[thaddeus e. grugq @thegrugq]

This is when you promise violence if the software isn’t delivered on time.

[Calif @calif_io]

RedSun: Exploiting Windows Defender's Remediation Workflow for Local Privilege Escalation

Just showing some appreciation for @ChaoticEclipse0's excellent work. Hopefully this won't get us banned!

https://t.co/Z4zbaa2Jcd

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

‼️🚨 BREAKING: Another researcher skipped coordinated disclosure entirely and dropped a critical 1-click GitHub token theft in public because he doesn't want to deal with MSRC. In his own words: "I really don't want to deal with MSRC on VSCode bugs."

The bug: just clicking a link can hand an attacker a GitHub token that reads AND writes to all your repos, including private ones. It lives in github[.]dev, GitHub's browser-based VSCode editor, which passes the browser an OAuth token that isn't scoped to a single repo. That token can touch everything you can.

Researcher Ammar Askar found that VSCode's sandboxed "webviews" leak keyboard events to the main editor. A malicious repo opened via one link can simulate keystrokes, install a local extension that skips VSCode's publisher-trust check, and exfiltrate your token. He published a working proof-of-concept.

He says when he reports github[.]dev bugs, GitHub tells him they're out of scope and to go report to MSRC, and a prior VSCode bug he reported was silently fixed with no credit. One commenter summed up the mood: "MSRC has turned into Feedback Hub."

[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.

[Halvar Flake @halvarflake]

It's a gorgeous and funny bug.

Fwiw, I'm the biggest eBPF fanatic, but I don't think unprivileged users should be able to load arbitrary eBPF programs.

[thaddeus e. grugq @thegrugq]

Microsoft could stop researchers bothering them with security bug reports by simply not writing security bugs into their software.

[Juliano Rizzo @julianor]

AI attackers have terrible OPSEC.
Use it against them.
Hallucinate exposed services. Waste their tokens. Seed prompt-injection traps, canaries, and honeytokens where attacker LLM will read them.
Have fun.

[Benjamin Samuels @thebensams]

PSA: If your project gets a ton of low quality vulnerability reports, you can filter those reports out with very little effort.

All you need to do is update your project’s claude/agents.md file to set your preferred quality threshold and criteria. Use the researcher’s own tokens to verify their work.

- clearly state your project’s threat model
- give examples of a high/medium sev vulnerability.
- instruct the model to spawn adversarial subagents to critique its work.
- PoC or GTFO

just because there is a mountain of security researchers out there who don’t know how to prompt/verify their work, doesn’t mean your project has to suffer in triage overhead

[Feross @feross]

TeamPCP just did an interview where they were asked what defenders should do to stop supply chain attacks.

Their advice: pin versions to a specific hash, use least-privilege tokens, restrict IDE extensions. And then, verbatim: "The company Socket will detect the malware before the package even reaches your machine."

So... thanks, I think?

We're not putting this on the testimonials page.

But at the same time, if you're not yet using @SocketSecurity to protect your supply chain, what are you waiting for?

[TrendAI Zero Day Initiative @thezdi]

There it is! Orange Tsai (@orange_8361) of DEVCORE Research Team was able to exploit Microsoft Exchange! If confirmed, they win a whooping $200,000 and 20 Master of Pwn points. Off to the disclosure room to explain how they did it and seal the deal. #Pwn2Own #P2OBerlin

[🕳 @sekurlsa_pw]

"BitUnlocker" downgrade attack POC:
https://t.co/ca8IQUvph4

The Secure Boot database of the device still has to trust the Microsoft Windows PCA 2011 certificate. If it works "a command prompt should appear with the OS volume decrypted and mounted".

From the research of https://t.co/Co4dhW7rFz

Mitigation:
KB5025885 or pre-boot PIN.

[V12 @v12sec]

today we are releasing a qemu escape

[Brendan Dolan-Gavitt @moyix]

This looks like an extremely interesting benchmark...

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

‼️🚨 This is wild. OpenAI just confirmed it got hit in the TanStack npm supply chain attack, and the attackers were close to being able to ship malicious code inside official OpenAI software, signed and trusted, if their incident response had not caught it in time.

The campaign is the work of TeamPCP, the same crew running the Mini Shai-Hulud wave.

Two employee devices in OpenAI's corporate environment were compromised through the malicious TanStack packages.

The attackers used that foothold to reach a limited subset of internal source code repositories.

OpenAI says only "limited credential material" was successfully exfiltrated, with no customer data, production systems, intellectual property or deployed software impacted.

Here is the part that should grab your attention.

OpenAI is rotating its code-signing certificates and forcing every macOS user to update their OpenAI apps.

You do not rotate signing certs for "limited credential material."

You rotate signing certs when the attacker was close enough to signing malicious binaries as OpenAI.

The "we contained it in time" framing is doing serious heavy lifting here.

For wider context, the same TeamPCP wave also hit Mistral AI, UiPath, Guardrails AI, OpenSearch and SAP npm packages. The TanStack compromise is tracked as CVE-2026-45321 at CVSS 9.6, and Mistral AI source code is already being advertised for sale by the group.

[Tyler Holmwood @tyholms]

One researcher. ~$300 in API tokens. A working PoC against an April Patch Tuesday CVE.

Open-sourcing PatchWatch + Pocsmith, an agentic patch-diffing → exploit pipeline I built from off-the-shelf parts.

https://t.co/J3VwhqB3JY

[Orange Tsai 🍊 @orange_8361]

That's my chain — a full chain w/ logic bugs only! No memory corruption, no AI, and of course no collisions at all 😉

[@aaronjmars @aaronjmars]

holy fuck, a hair dryer at a Paris airport broke Polymarket weather markets & made someone $34,000 richer

- polymarket was settling Paris temperature bets on a single Météo France sensor sitting near the Charles de Gaulle runway perimeter - basically unguarded

- the guy bought the long-shot outcome (like "22°C" when everyone expected 18°C) for pennies, since nobody thought it'd hit

- then he walked up to the probe and briefly heated the air around it with a portable heat source, spiking the reading just long enough to register as the daily max

- temperature snapped back to normal in minutes, the market resolved in his favor, and he cashed out - twice, on April 6 and April 15, before Météo France caught on and filed charges

hyperstitions.

[Sébastien Dudek 📡 @FlUxIuS]

Think your guest Wi-Fi is isolated from your main network? Think again.
AirSnitch (NDSS'26) breaks client isolation on every router tested: from home APs to enterprise WPA2/3-Enterprise. Full MitM in seconds, sometimes leaking WPA2 traffic in plaintext.
Technique breakdown & tool usage: 🔗 https://t.co/1vze7v1tdk

[stacksmashing @ghidraninja]

Yes VSCode, I obviously want to use the color-picker to edit my address offsets in Arm assembly 😂

[InfoGuard Labs @InfoGuard_Labs]

Need a SYSTEM shell? Just ask your EDR!

CVE-2025-13176: ESET Inspect Connector looks for an OpenSSL config in a user-writable path. It’s an easy LPE that loads your payload directly into the EDR process.
by @p0w1_ https://t.co/SutubkKYEW