LLMs won't break symmetric crypto
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.)An improved key-recovery attack on 7-round AES-128, while the full version does 10 rounds. The attack is , and totally not a surprise, posing no threat to AES.
- ▪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.)An improved key-recovery at
- ▪The attack is , and totally not a surprise, posing no threat to AES.
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| Publication time | Thu, 06 Aug 2026 01:39:06 +0000 |
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LLMs won't break symmetric cryptoAnd Anthropic's cryptanalysis work is greatJul 31, 20265ShareOn 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.)An improved key-recovery attack on 7-round AES-128, while the full version does 10 rounds.
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