NOMINATION HIGHLIGHTS

Crypto Lab is an independently built, open-source suite of 110+ interactive cryptography demonstrations that run entirely in the browser — no accounts, no backends, no API keys, no telemetry. Just the math, made tangible.

The collection spans the full modern cryptographic landscape: symmetric and public-key encryption, hash functions, key exchange, digital signatures, zero-knowledge proofs (SNARKs, STARKs, Bulletproofs), homomorphic encryption (TFHE, BGV/BFV, CKKS), secure multi-party computation, threshold schemes, and a uniquely deep post-quantum track covering every NIST family — lattice (ML-KEM, ML-DSA, Falcon, FrodoKEM), code-based (Classic McEliece, BIKE, HQC), hash-based (SPHINCS+, LMS/XMSS), and isogeny.

What distinguishes Crypto Lab is that the demos run real cryptography, not animations of it. Live X25519 arithmetic, genuine WebCrypto operations, actual lattice reduction in the browser. The attack demos are equally real: a working Dual_EC_DRBG backdoor showing future-output prediction, the Vaudenay padding-oracle attack with byte-by-byte recovery, KyberSlash timing leakage, ECDSA nonce-bias lattice key recovery, and the Castryck-Decru isogeny break. Learners see not only how primitives work, but precisely how they fail when assumptions drift from deployment reality — the lesson most cryptography education omits.

The suite is grounded in current standards and research: RFC 9591 FROST, RFC 9420 MLS, RFC 9807 OPAQUE, FIPS 204, NIST SP 800-208, and recent ePrint papers. It tracks real-world deployments — the X25519+ML-KEM-768 hybrid handshake now in Chrome, Cloudflare, and Signal; threshold ECDSA behind Fireblocks and Coinbase; STARKs behind StarkNet.

Crypto Lab also reflects a distinctive perspective: as the work of a librarian, it brings information-ethics demos found nowhere else — information-theoretic private information retrieval applied directly to library catalog privacy, connecting patron-confidentiality ethics to concrete mathematical guarantees.

The lab is one tier of a deliberate four-part educational arc: Cipher Museum (3,900 years of history) → Crypto Compare (algorithm reference) → Crypto Lab (interactive experimentation) → and applied tooling. Together they move a learner from a classical cipher to a post-quantum TLS handshake.

Every demo is open source, standardized to a consistent template, dark-mode-first, and free forever. Built and maintained by one person, Crypto Lab demonstrates that rigorous, accessible, dependency-free cryptography education can be delivered at a scale and depth usually reserved for institutions — putting the entire field, fundamentals through frontier research, one click away from anyone.