Discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude
TLDR Dev ● Covered by 4 sources
Anthropic researchers used Claude Mythos Preview to discover two cryptographic flaws: an improved attack on HAWK, a post-quantum digital signature candidate, which halves its effective key strength, and a novel attack on reduced-round AES that speeds up previous best attacks by 200-800 times. Each discovery cost approximately $100,000 in API costs and required one researcher working with Claude for 60 hours on HAWK and a scaffolded autonomous process for AES. Neither finding affects production systems today, but they demonstrate AI's potential to stress-test cryptographic algorithms before real-world deployment and suggest cryptographic designers should routinely use powerful AI models during standards development.
Why it matters
Researchers have used Claude to identify vulnerabilities in cryptographic algorithms, discovering an attack that weakens HAWK's security by halving its key strength and improving attack efficiency on reduced-round AES by up to 800 times.
