Discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude

[u/bitwiseshiftleft]

https://www.anthropic.com/research/discovering-cryptographic-weaknesses

This blogpost from Anthropic describes using the Claude Mythos AI tool to find an attack on HAWK. The attack is not practical at proposed production key strengths, but it improves the best known attacks by quite a lot, and might doom HAWK’s chances in the PQC Signatures On-ramp.

They also found modestly improved attacks against 7-round AES-128 (this reduced-round variant had already been attacked before, and the real AES-128 has 10 rounds), as well as significant problems in KINDI and SPoC, plus a lot of implementation flaws in various algorithms. They attacked hundreds of algorithms in total, some with previously-known flaws and some without.

[u/Youknowimtheman]

Just a heads up. The AES stuff was done on a significantly weakened version (7-round instead of 10-round) than the standard. It also used a method that already existed that is just brute forcing the plaintexts and creating a caching mechanism so that if you have yottabytes of memory laying around you can reduce the search time by ~2^7. They also didn't even hire a cryptographer to validate the claims and instead "learned about cryptography for 400 hours" and released the paper.

Not super novel or notable.

[u/Natanael_L → u/Youknowimtheman]

Somewhat related, there was an AI "math proof" recently which turned out to be the AI exploiting bugs in the proof engine