Claude AI cracks post

Claude AI has cracked a post-quantum encryption test scheme and discovered a 200 - 800 times faster attack on a reduced-round version of AES-128.

The breakthrough, achieved using Anthropic's Mythos Preview AI, comes just as the field of post-quantum cryptography is gaining critical attention ahead of NIST standardization. So, for those who don't know, AES-128 is the encryption standard used throughout modern computing, and full AES-128 performs 10 rounds of mathematical transformations. Claude attacked a research version of HAWK-256, a digital signature system designed to remain secure even against quantum computers. The system is currently being tested by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Claude attacked the research version of HAWK with only seven rounds and discovered hidden symmetry in the HAWK-256 lattice-based algorithm, reducing its effective key strength and enabling a full key recovery in about 3 hours and 42 minutes on a 96-core server. Separately, Mythos found a way to streamline a seven-round AES-128 attack by eliminating a 256-way guessing step, though both remain infeasible for real-world systems.

Anthropic says neither result threatens production software, as HAWK-256 and the results gathered from the testing are used to gauge cryptographic resilience, which has proved beneficial as Claude has demonstrated how AI models can be used to evaluate encryption schemes before they are deployed, or to simply discover weaknesses that humans have overlooked.

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The company said the AI conducted the bulk of the research autonomously, with human input limited to oversight and verification. The cost? Roughly $100,000 in API usage for both projects, for a total of $200,000 in API costs.