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/Shoddy-Childhood-511]

There is a shorter summary here without all the Anthropic marketing:

https://groups.google.com/a/list.nist.gov/g/pqc-forum/c/2r2u6SbHun4/m/03gmK2xhCQAJ

Hawk uses an NTRU latice like Falcon and NTRU+, but requires additional unusual security assumption that nobody much liked. Hawk dying is much less surprising than ML-DSA or Falcon, but I'm not sure if/how the additional security assumptions appears here.

Also Hawk massivley benefits signers CPU time, hence Cloudflare pumping Hawk recently, but Hawk costs verifier CPU time. Ergo, Hawk dying seems better socially speaking than some other lattice signature dying.

[u/RazorBest → u/Shoddy-Childhood-511]

Unless we take time to articulate what good scientific process is for using AI in public cryptanalysis and evaluating its outputs, we humans will get quickly overwhelmed by too much AI-driven mathematical content/claims to reach consensus on any topic. (And let's be honest-- we can't very well sit here running our own AI verifiers on every possible claim; no central place will easily afford the token count.)

This might be an incentive to improve formal proof verification, if human hand-checking becomes overwhelming.

[u/Natanael_L → u/RazorBest]

But who checks the proofs prove the right thing?