My experience at RWC

On 9-11 March I was happy to attend the Real World Crypto Symposium 2026 in Taipei, Taiwan. It was a relatively small event with about 600 participants, focused mainly on the application of cryptography in the real world.

While not all the presentations were strictly about cryptography, they all covered adjacent areas and, more importantly, provided a valuable overview of the state of the art in related fields. There were a lot of interesting presentations, for example, about the (in)security of password managers, or about a bus interposition attacks on DDR server memory with cheap jury-rigged equipment, and many others.

The most relevant presentation for the OpenSSL Project was on the last day, concerning Merkle Tree Certificates — a joint project by Google and Cloudflare. This technology offers an alternative to X.509 certificates that could maintain reasonable verification times after the post-quantum transition. It's definitely something we should consider supporting.

Informal communication during coffee breaks and evening events was also very useful.