IT systems are facing an increasing number of security threats, including advanced persistent attacks and future quantum-computing vulnerabilities. The move towards crypto-agility and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) requires a reliable inventory of cryptographic assets across heterogeneous IT environments. Due to the sheer amount of packets, it is infeasible to manually detect cryptographically relevant software. Further, static code analysis pipelines often fail to address the diversity of modern ecosystems. Our research explores the use of large language models (LLMs) as heuristic tools for cryptographic asset discovery. We propose a collaborative framework that employs multiple LLMs to assess software relevance and aggregates their outputs through majority voting. To preserve data privacy, the approach operates on-premises without reliance on external servers. Using over 65,000 Fedora Linux packages, we evaluate the reliability of this method through statistical analysis, inter-model agreement, and manual validation. Preliminary results suggest that~LLM ensembles can serve as an efficient first-pass filter for identifying cryptographic software, resulting in reduced manual workload and assisting PQC transition. The study also compares on-premises and online LLM configurations, highlighting key advantages, limitations, and future directions for automated cryptographic asset discovery.

Creators of digital artifacts are increasingly competing with generative artificial intelligence. Next to common plagiarism, this is another reason why proving one’s authorship becomes increasingly important. One way to support this proof is to document the work process in a certified artifact. Blockchain technology lends itself to this by generation of a data structure that is intrinsically unchangeable and via strong asymmetric cryptographic algorithms tied to the creator. In this paper, we present a concept to record and validate one’s creative work. To demonstrate its feasibility, we provide a proof of concept implementation that documents and encodes a sculpting process conducted in the open-source modeling software Blender.

Many security protocols used for daily Internet traffic have been used for decades and standardization bodies like the IETF often provide extensions for legacy protocols to deal with new requirements. Even though the security aspects for extensions are carefully discussed, automated reasoning has proven to be a valuable tool to uncover security holes that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. Therefore, Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) is already a customary procedure for the development of some new protocols, e.g., TLS 1.3 and MLS.

The recent advances in the development of quantum computers pose a threat to the cryptography used today. While symmetric algorithms can adapt to those challenges, no prevalent key exchange method can protect against quantum computer based attacks. There already exist several new, quantum-resistant approaches. Yet, all of them either lack in confidence regarding their security or require large data to be transmitted. Due to the lack of confidence in these algorithms, researchers tend towards hybrid key exchange methods which combine at least two different algorithms. As long as one of them prevails, the shared secret remains secure. Yet, these hybrid key exchanges together with algorithms which transmit large payloads require significant changes to the design of security protocols. IKEv2 is willing to introduce radical changes in order to support as many different algorithms as possible. This was expected to impact the protocol's operational feasibility, but remained to be tested due to the lack of a working reference implementation of the newly proposed internet drafts. To address this issue, we implemented these drafts using a modified version of the OpenIKED as basis that already comprised the first steps towards the concept's integration. During the implementation we found that several design choices severely hinder a clean and maintainable structure. With the resulting implementation, we tested the adjusted protocol under real-world conditions. The results show that the result generally works but struggles to cope with slow, lossy networks. Based on these insights, we drafted an improved protocol design which also supports the full range of quantum-resistant key exchange methods. In contrast to the current drafts, it promises a cheaper and more maintainable implementation.