Thread

1. grey-area · 1789827910 · focus · HN ↗

   Using an existing published key, which people hadn’t tried because the message was sent before the key was supposed to be used.

   This headline is misleading.

   1. durdn · 1789829396 · focus · HN ↗

      First, it’s LLMs can’t do cryptanalysis. They can barely solve toy substitution ciphers without hallucinating.

      Then it’s OK, they can reproduce known attacks, but that’s just pattern matching against papers already in the training data.

      Then it’s OK, they found previously unknown attacks on SpoC and a flaw in KINDI’s security proof, but those are obscure competition schemes nobody uses.

      Then it’s OK, Claude found a new attack on HAWK that cuts the effective security of a NIST post-quantum signature candidate roughly in half, but HAWK isn’t deployed and a human researcher was involved.

      Then it’s OK, Claude independently found a new cryptanalytic attack on AES that improves the previous best technique by 200–800×, but it’s only 7-round AES, not the full 10 rounds.

      Then it’s OK, it found a practical key-recovery attack on 13-round LEA that runs in under an hour instead of requiring ~2^86 work, but LEA has 24 rounds.

      Then it’s OK but none of this breaks a production cipher.

      Wake me up when it breaks full AES.

      Then—

      1. grey-area · 1789836660 · focus · HN ↗

         This particular exploit belongs something between points 2 and 3 in your list and was more about processing data with a known algorithm and known key for the dataset that nobody had tried, so I'd say it is less impressive than a lot of other results LLMs have had in cryptanalysis. I object to the headline but the article was interesting.

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