From the lab.

Insights from our audit practice, software releases, and applied cryptography research.

2026.08.15 · Software

Verifpal Reaches 1.0: A Toy Becomes an Instrument

Verifpal 1.0 removes the beta warning the tool has printed with every analysis since 2020, on the strength of a new paper. The language now covers post-quantum key exchange, declared weakening assumptions, witness-based unlinkability, and two concurrent sessions of every principal; the engine behind it comes with a soundness theorem that holds however the solver behaves, unconditional termination, and attack traces measured for readability against ProVerif and Tamarin.

20 min read
2026.08.08 · Software

Verifpal 0.80.0: Nuancing Weak Cryptography Modeling and Witness-Based Unlinkability

Verifpal 0.80.0 lets a model declare that a particular piece of cryptography is broken (weak, forgeable, and from a chosen phase onward) instead of approximating the break with a list of leaked values, and decides unlinkability queries by searching for a concrete link witness that it then reports back to you.

19 min read
2026.08.05 · Software

Verifpal 0.70.0: Post-Quantum Key Exchange, and an Attacker That Works Backwards

Verifpal 0.70.0 removes Diffie-Hellman equations from the modelling language, adds a generic KEM for post-quantum and hybrid key exchange, rebuilds the active attacker around a search that works backwards from each query, and narrates every attack it finds as numbered causal steps.

20 min read
2026.07.29 · Announcement

Meet the Symbolic Software Summer 2026 Team

Five people joined us this summer: two research interns formalizing zkVM soundness bounds in Lean, and three teaching assistants running the Applied Cryptography course. Here they are, in their own words.

4 min read
2026.07.22 · Essay

Why I Teach Cryptography in Lebanon

Cedarcrypt's first edition has concluded. On what a year of teaching cryptography in and for Lebanon has meant, why the conference met in Cyprus rather than Beirut, and the decades of work ahead.

12 min read
2026.05.31 · Research

How Jevil works

A playground-first, interactive explainer for Jevil, a post-quantum, transparent few-time signature scheme whose key-recovery threshold is a single sharp cliff rather than a slow slope.

11 min read
2026.05.21 · Security

On Our Telegram MTProto Review

A note on Symbolic Software's technical review of Telegram's MTProto protocol, made public in 2026 through litigation. Covers the auth_key_id tracking vulnerability, the empirical case against Telegram's 'changes regularly' rebuttal, the editorial independence terms of the engagement, and how the document entered the public record.

13 min read
2026.05.12 · Announcement

Applied Cryptography Course: Welcome, Class of Summer 2026!

Fifty students from nine institutions have been selected for the Summer 2026 Applied Cryptography online program, our free intensive course bringing modern cryptography to Lebanese university students. What the course covers, and who is joining us this June.

4 min read
2026.05.08 · Software

hpke-ng: Faster, Smaller, Harder HPKE for Rust

126 head-to-head benchmarks against hpke-rs and rust-hpke. hpke-ng wins 103, ties 19, loses 4. ML-KEM-1024 decap −55%, X25519 decap −41%, export −72% to −76%, end-to-end roundtrip −30%, plus a type system that catches four classes of bug at compile time.

26 min read
2026.05.06 · Research

Announcing the Post-Quantum Migration Playbook

A 52-page practitioner guide for engineers and architects working on post-quantum migration, alongside an interactive scorecard and TLS scanner at pq-migration.symbolic.software.

1 min read
2026.04.13 · Research

Hybrid Constructions Are a Safety Blanket, and That's Fine

Why Symbolic Software agrees with Soatok's position on hybrid post-quantum constructions: hybrids are compelling for KEMs, far less necessary for signatures, and the real risk is migration friction.

6 min read