Every year, the IACR Real World Cryptography symposium brings together researchers, engineers and practitioners in applied cryptography to discuss cryptography that matters, in the real world. To me, this is the big one! The one cryptography conference that matters the most. Who needs proceedings when you’ve got so much excitement in the air, and so many results and projects that actually have a measurable impact on how cryptography affects the real world? This year’s program is maybe the most exciting yet, with talks on secure channel protocols, multiparty computation, formal methods, post-quantum cryptography, humans, policy and cryptography, hardware, cryptocurrency, cryptography for the cloud, anonymity and more. So many exciting talks! So much new research to discuss! Like every year, Real World Crypto is shaping up to be a veritable who’s who of applied cryptography. In this special episode of Cryptography FM, I’m joined by fellow researcher Benjamin Lipp in order to just… candidly go through the program of Real World Crypto 2021 and covering each talk’s abstract briefly. We’re going to have another special episode after Real World Crypto 2021 as a post-conference episode in order to discuss the highlights of the conference. And hopefully we’ll do this every year here on Cryptography FM! Music composed by Toby Fox and performed by The Consouls. Special Guest: Benjamin Lipp. Sponsored By: Symbolic Software: This episode is sponsored by Symbolic Software. Symbolic Software helps you bring in the experience and knowledge necessary to design, or prove secure, state-of-the-art cryptographic systems for new solutions. We've helped design and formally verify some of the world's most widely used cryptographic protocols.