Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview AI model has identified significant cryptographic weaknesses, leading to an end-to-end key-recovery attack against HAWK-256 and a substantial speedup for an attack on seven-round AES-128, according to a recent report by The Hacker News.
The HAWK attack exploits a previously unknown symmetry in the lattice structure of the signature scheme, enabling a key recovery in approximately three hours and 42 minutes on a 96-core server. While HAWK remains a candidate in the NIST post-quantum standardization process, this attack specifically targets the HAWK-256 challenge parameter and does not affect production systems. The AES-128 attack, targeting seven of its ten rounds, achieves a 200- to 800-fold speedup by removing a guessing step from an existing meet-in-the-middle attack. However, this attack still requires an impractical number of chosen plaintexts and does not necessitate changes to production software. Anthropic emphasized that neither finding impacts current security protocols, with the HAWK attack not extending to other NIST signature candidates or lattice cryptography generally. The research, largely conducted by the AI with human oversight for direction and verification, highlights the growing capability of AI in cryptanalysis.
Source: The Hacker News
Kelley Damore is Chief Content Officer at CyberRisk Alliance, where she leads content strategy across the company’s digital brands, research, communities and live events serving CISOs and security practitioners. At CyberRisk Alliance, she is focused on delivering 365-day engagement, trusted journalism and actionable insights to help security leaders navigate an increasingly complex threat landscape.
Kelley Damore is Chief Content Officer at CyberRisk Alliance, where she leads content strategy across the company’s digital brands, research, communities and live events serving CISOs and security practitioners. At CyberRisk Alliance, she is focused on delivering 365-day engagement, trusted journalism and actionable insights to help security leaders navigate an increasingly complex threat landscape.
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