The internet’s newest cryptographic foundations — deployed globally just one year ago and baked into every modern browser, messaging app, and VPN — will face their first concentrated academic scrutiny starting Monday, when CRYPTO 2026, the world’s foremost cryptology research conference, opens its main program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The 46th edition of the International Association for Cryptologic Research’s flagship gathering arrives at an inflection point: it is the first CRYPTO held after the National Institute of Standards and Technology finalized its post-quantum cryptography standards in August 2024, which means the lattice mathematics underlying those standards — now running on…