LLMs won't break symmetric crypto
Anthropic researchers used their Claude LLM to identify vulnerabilities in cryptographic schemes, including HAWK and AES-128. While the findings do not pose an immediate threat to current encryption standards, they demonstrate the potential for AI to assist in complex cryptanalytic research.
Why it matters
This research marks a significant step in using AI as a tool for scientific discovery in cryptography, potentially accelerating both the development and the breaking of security protocols.
5 Share On July 28th Anthropic announced new cryptanalytic attacks discovered using their LLM Claude Mythos:
A key-recovery attack on HAWK , a post-quantum signature scheme candidate in NIST’s “Additional Digital Signatures” standardization project. Except for the toy version HAWK-256 whose 64-bit security is practically breakable, the new attack is not practical . But it's a meaningful break of HAWK’s security, as it reduces the estimated security level of HAWK-512 from its 128-bit target to at most 108 bits and, speculatively, as little as 81 (see Appendix C of the paper .)
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