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Anthropic says Claude found new attacks on post-quantum crypto standards

The findings cut the estimated work to steal HAWK’s smallest key from 2^64 to 2^38 operations and require roughly doubling HAWK’s keys, which would erode its compact and fast-signing pitch.

Reported · Written up by our desk · Regulation

Anthropic said its unreleased Claude Mythos Preview model discovered two previously unknown cryptographic attacks, including one on HAWK, a post-quantum digital signature scheme that is competing to become a U.S. federal standard.

According to Decrypt, the HAWK result targets a symmetry in the scheme’s math and reduces the estimated cost of recovering the smallest configuration’s secret key from 2^64 operations to 2^38, roughly a 67 million times reduction. Anthropic said addressing the issue would require roughly doubling HAWK’s key sizes, a change it said would eliminate many reasons the scheme is attractive as a post-quantum signature candidate, including its focus on compact keys and fast signing.

Decrypt also reported that Claude sped up an attack on a 7-round version of AES by 200 to 800 times, beating a record set in 2013. Anthropic said each result required about $100,000 in API usage, and staff spent several hundred hours verifying the AES work.

Anthropic coordinated the HAWK disclosure with NIST and disclosed both findings to the algorithms’ authors and U.S. government and industry partners before publishing. Decrypt noted HAWK has never been deployed anywhere and that Bitcoin still uses pre-quantum ECDSA for now, with the post-quantum schemes intended for future replacement.

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