Story
LLMs won't break symmetric crypto
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Overview
Anthropic's LLM Claude Mythos has discovered key-recovery attacks on HAWK, a post-quantum signature scheme candidate. While the attack is impractical for most versions of HAWK, it significantly reduces the security of the toy version HAWK-256, which has 64-bit security that is nearly breakable.
Summary from bfswa.blog.
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Hacker News · bfswa.blog
Hacker News discussion ↗
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Based on 5 sampled comments from this thread. Analyzed 2026-08-06.
- Praise: LLMs are poised to supercharge math research, which could lead to breakthroughs that challenge traditional encryption methods — the potential for innovation is enormous.
- Praise: LLMs might excel at tedious testing and reasoning tasks in cryptography, where human effort has struggled, suggesting a new era of discovery in security research.
- Praise: Recent examples show LLMs identifying basic bugs in encryption libraries that humans overlooked, proving their utility in enhancing crypto implementations.
- Concern: Skeptics argue that saying LLMs will never break symmetric crypto is overly confident; the effort required is substantial, but past successes in math challenges suggest it's possible.
- Concern: Critics point out that the foundational assumptions about the impossibility of reversing cryptographic calculations are shaky, with no guarantees against future breakthroughs.
- Concern: Many believe that the extensive human effort in breaking encryption algorithms has yet to yield a viable attack, casting doubt on the notion that LLMs will easily succeed.