On a personal note, for those of you living in Belgium:

on Saturday 18 May I will have the pleasure to conduct the KU Leuven Interfak Big Band with as guest soloist the great Bert Joris on trumpet.
The program will be featuring a selection of the amazing compositions that Bert wrote for big band (for a sample https://werfrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-music-of-bert-joris).

Details: 18 May 2024, 20:00 Aula Pieter De Somer, Charles Deberiotstraat 24 Leuven.
If you want to buy tickets in advance, reach out to me.

Very happy and proud to announce that Emilia Kasper (my ex-PhD student) received today the prestigious Levchin prize for Real World Cryptography for her great work on certificate transparency (together with Al Cutter, Adam Langley and Ben Laurie).
https://rwc.iacr.org/LevchinPrize/

After Joan Daemen, Markulf Kolhlweiss and Vincent Rijmen the fourth researcher with a PhD from COSIC KU Leuven to receive this high-profile award. We are making a difference.

Also congratulations to Anna Lysyanskaya and Jan Camenish for receiving the Levchin award for their work on anonymous credentials, work dating back to 2001. Let's hope that EU digital wallet teams pay attention and implement these ideas to give EU citizens privacy-friendly IDs.

VRT (Flemish TV) reports that photographers are angry because Belgian cities now offer free passport photographs.
https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2024/03/05/gratis-pasfoto-op-gemeentehuis-makkelijk-en-veilig-voor-de-burg/

But they don't say why: the reason is a morphing attack, that produces a morphed photo that looks to a human like person A but to a computer like person B. A threat to automated passport gates and massive biometric identification by police.
This is not scifi or pure academic Moreover, this kind of attack is hard to detect. For more read
https://christoph-busch.de/projects-mad.html

Unclear whether this attack has been seen in the wild. But would governments tell us? Or perhaps the bad guys have used it and no one found out. The fact that systems are being changed shows that this attack is taken serious.