Claude AI Demonstrates Cryptanalytic Advances on HAWK-256 and 7-Round AES-128

Claude AI demonstrated a key-recovery attack on the HAWK-256 post-quantum signature scheme by exploiting lattice symmetries, reducing its work factor from 2^64 to 2^38. It also developed a 200-800x faster meet-in-the-middle attack on 7-round AES-128 by eliminating a 256-way guessing step.

Anthropic says Claude Mythos Preview helped derive an end-to-end key-recovery attack against HAWK-256 and a 200- to 800-fold speedup for an attack on seven-round AES-128.

The HAWK attack exploits a previously unused symmetry in the lattice behind the signature scheme. Anthropic's released implementation gives an expected end-to-end runtime of about three hours and 42 minutes on a 96-core server

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