Claude found mathematical flaws in two cryptographic algorithms that years of expert review missed
TL;DR
Claude Mythos found mathematical weaknesses in HAWK (halving key strength) and reduced-round AES (200-800x faster attack). Both discovered mostly autonomously. No production systems affected. Each cost ~$100K.
Anthropic announced on Monday that Claude Mythos Preview has discovered mathematical weaknesses in two cryptographic algorithms. The first substantially weakens HAWK, a post-quantum digital signature scheme under review by NIST, by cutting its effective key strength in half. The second improves the best-known attack on seven-round AES, the most widely used symmetric cipher, by 200-800x. Neither result affects production systems. HAWK is not deployed, and the AES attack targets a reduced variant, not the full cipher.
The distinction from Anthropic’s earlier cybersecurity work is critical. Claude had previously found vulnerabilities in cryptographic libraries, meaning bugs in how programmers implemented algorithms. These new results are flaws in the mathematics of the algorithms themselves, discovered after years of expert human review failed to find...
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