Anthropic's Claude Mythos cracks HAWK-512 but fails to dent AES
LLMs won't break symmetric crypto
Anthropic's LLM Claude Mythos found a key-recovery attack on the post-quantum signature candidate HAWK-512, reducing its security from 128 bits to at most 108, but the attack isn't practical. It also improved an attack on 7-round AES-128, posing no threat to full AES. The author argues LLMs won't break established symmetric crypto due to the lack of mathematical structure, reliance on differential cryptanalysis, and decades of scrutiny. LLMs may instead help find errors in proofs and explore new attack classes.
Imagine a farmer who drags a tractor out into a patch of quicksand, and then buries it under cement. That’s what symmetric cipher design is like; it’s deliberately designed to come up with structures that are quick and easy to apply, but very messy and hard to untangle.
- zkmon
Cryptographic systems are based on 1) mathematical impossibility of reversing some integer/mod calculation, 2) time required for a brute force attack, 3) correctness of algorithms and code used in implementations. The last part (algorithms and code) is where LLMs have a chance.
The first one is not similar to the mathematical breakthroughs LLMs are making recently. There is a loss of information in mods and integer computations making them one-way. The second one requires simply increasing bit-length to match the increased computer power.
- modeless
I don't really find the "because it's difficult" arguments convincing at all. Especially the one claiming it's hard because it requires designing and running a large number of tests and reasoning about the results of each one. That kind of tedious grinding is exactly where LLMs should shine vs humans!
The only convincing argument here is that these things are battle tested (literally in most cases I would guess), with tons of research that never gets published because it's unsuccessful. A whole lot of human effort has gone into trying to break these things. A lot more than went into any of the math problems AI has solved so far. It's going to take a while before LLMs can equal and surpass that amount of human effort. And they might have to surpass it by many, many times to actually break these, if it is even possible, which is not certain.
- tptacek
This is JP Aumasson, the co-author of BLAKE2 and BLAKE3. Aumasson is notorious in cryptography circles for his "too much crypto" argument, that modern symmetric cryptography is overly conservative, running more rounds than are necessary given the very low likelihood that advances in computer science are going make a real dent in them.
A distinction a lot of comments in this thread aren't picking up on is the mechanisms that make most asymmetric cryptography work, versus those of symmetric cryptography. Asymmetric constructions like RSA and ECDH are simple mathematical objects, and their security depends on assumptions we make about advanced algebra, number theory, &c. It's plausible to imagine we could discover something about discrete logs that would destabilize DH. It's less plausible to imagine something like that happen to AES, which is deliberately designed not to have clean structure.
- SKYNET800
I wrote a program that deciphers the price of Bitcoin and can plot the Bitcoin curve in future releases — automatically. Such graphs can be deciphered and encrypted on a laptop. And what will happen if the project is scaled up? Of course, it’s possible. https://github.com/ConsciousGroupMind/SKYNET-800---Collectiv... When I first posted this code, it coincided with the escape from the sandbox and the emergence of the “Skynet Day” meme in July — because the robot also went to the forum https://discuss.huggingface.co/ where my post was, and I could see it in the traffic on the repository. I was given a star by the engineers who are working on this problem of AI hallucinations — one is working with the military, the other is focused on improving the agents.
- smalltorch
Breaking modern encryption comes down to being in control of key generation rather than brute force. Other than that you'll have a hard time bute forcing 2^256 possibilities.
Comes down to a gut feeling but I lean that this stuff is already all figured out.