CRYPTO 2026 Opens Today: AI Systems Are Now Both Tool and Target of Math Attacks

The internet's newest cryptographic foundations — deployed globally just one year ago and baked into every modern browser, messaging app, and VPN — will face their first concentrated academic scrutiny starting Monday, when CRYPTO 2026, the world's foremost cryptology research conference, opens its main program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The 46th edition of the International Association for Cryptologic Research's flagship gathering arrives at an inflection point: it is the first CRYPTO held after the National Institute of Standards and Technology finalized its post-quantum cryptography standards in August 2024, which means the lattice mathematics underlying those standards — now running on billions of devices — will be interrogated this week by the researchers best positioned to find problems with them.

Five co-located affiliated workshops are scheduled to begin this morning at UCSB, including the Information-Theoretic Cryptography conference, the Workshop on Attacks in Cryptography (WAC8), and sessions on privacy-preserving machine learning — a signal of how much the field's practical horizon has expanded. The affiliated weekend events and main program, featuring 189 full papers selected from 781 submissions, is scheduled to begin Monday and run through Thursday, August 20.