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Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

anthropic.com

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Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#41

Post by quotemstr »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #20
quotemstr wrote: post #14

One attack weakens HAWK, a post-quantum cryptography cipher candidate. I don't trust these PQC things one bit. I'll use them in combination with a strong clasically-resistant cipher (in so-called hybrid encryption modes), but not alone. There's a push to turn off the classical modes and rely entirely on PQC for both quantum and classical security. Uh... no, thank you? Why would we want to do that at this point? The c…

The classical cipher component is additonal complexity in the protocol and maybe some meaningful amount of additonal time to compute and key data to store/transmit, is it not? I can see why we'd like to avoid effectively encrypting the same data twice with different protocols, one of which is known to be vulnerable to quantum computer based attacks.

Classic ciphers are damn fast and small compared to PQC. If you're doing PQC anyway, doing classical cryptography at the same time has negligible cost.

That makes attempts to push PQC-only modes super suspicious to me. Smells like Dual_EC_DRBG.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#42

Post by heaney-555 »

ecshafer wrote: post #17
mmaunder wrote: post #15

“Each of the results cost roughly $100,000 in API cost to develop.” And “Over the course of a week, one Anthropic researcher worked together with Claude to develop the HAWK attack, and another researcher built a scaffold4 that allowed Claude to fully autonomously discover the AES attack.” Spending $100k in tokens in a week is an impressive feat even with massive parallelization. I suspect the TPS their internal folks…

So $1-10k in Chinese model time, thus why we must ban them.

If a Chinese model can do it for $1-10K, then why hasn't one?

Why have all the mathematical (and now cryptographic) breakthroughs come from OpenAI and Anthropic?

Is it possibly because the Chinese models are so benchmaxxed they can't make novel discoveries?

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#43

Post by impulser_ »

_dwt wrote: post #22

I find that some of my friends and acquaintances have gotten obsessed with prompting style, "prompt engineering", which skills to use, which skills to build, "context engineering", and a billion other variations on "how to write smart things so the model does good". Friends, look at the prompts that Anthropic's own people are putting into the machine: > A few hours after the first message, we found that Claude was st…

Yeah, in fact you can actually make the model perform worst. You should allow the model to "think for itself" instead of pushing your reasoning into the prompt. You should give it simple prompt and steer it along the way.

Skills, CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md should only ever be used if the model struggle at something or doesn't know how to use something. Vast majority of project should never need a skill or CLAUDE.md. If you writing React apps you don't need these.

Give a LLM a bash tool and a prompt and it will outperform your complex setup with skills and tools.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#44

Post by qingcharles »

_dwt wrote: post #22

I find that some of my friends and acquaintances have gotten obsessed with prompting style, "prompt engineering", which skills to use, which skills to build, "context engineering", and a billion other variations on "how to write smart things so the model does good". Friends, look at the prompts that Anthropic's own people are putting into the machine: > A few hours after the first message, we found that Claude was st…

It's counter to what sci-fi taught us using AI would be like. We never thought we'd have to feed it words of encouragement, we expected it to act more mechanically, like the computer interfaces we have been using, but here we are. It's kind of quaint, and kind of endearing.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#45

Post by TeMPOraL »

elictronic wrote: post #38
TeMPOraL wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voice dictation tools? Not really. Tried various dictation tools interacting on the phone, but the quality varies, and resulting prompts are very much not like I would write them. My limiting factor is that 99% of the day I'm around people - either at work, or at home with wife and kids. There's almost no point during the day I could feel comfortable talking at an AI, and even if I stay up late, then talking risks wa…

Get a noise machine for wife and kids bedrooms. I talk to friends late at night and my deep voice carries through walls. Works great. I have zero desire to talk to an ai though, that was cool for about 20 minutes on my pentium 1 acer computer. Hasn’t been since. Old competent non paid Alexa was good for timers as well, the rest of the platforms a turd, nice timers though.

> that was cool for about 20 minutes on my pentium 1 acer computer. Hasn’t been since.

Oh back in the days, i.e. 20 years ago, I had a better voice control system than anything afforded by Alexa or Apple or others, using MS Speech API in its custom constrained grammar mode, plus some bootleg samples of Star Trek's computer voice + a sub-dollar microphone soldered to a long cable and hung on the side of the wardrobe.

The trick that made it work? Microsoft Speech API actually let you train voice to your own text corpus. I'd prepare all combinations of commands I want to issue, print it out, and train it over a dozen short sessions in several locations of the room and at different ambient noise levels (from silent through various genres of music playing at various loudness). End result was more reliable and had better voice-mismatch rejection than any current system I've tried.

Oh, and the real kicker? This all worked fully locally; this was before cloud was even a thing. Turns out you don't actually need cloud for reliable voice control. Nor that much processing power; PC I had then was relatively budget even for 2006.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#46

Post by arcanemachiner »

jstanley wrote: post #40
estearum wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried using Wispr or Willow (or any one of a thousand alternatives?) A little odd at first but absolutely amazing for the purpose of piling context into an LLM.

It's so bizarre to me that people want to do this. Can't you type faster than you speak? Doesn't your speaking inhibit your thinking? Aren't you self-conscious talking out loud? How are our experiences so different?

My stream of barely-intelligible rambling comes out much faster than I can type, and it's not even close.

It's a skill like any other. You start out stuttering and second-guessing yourself, but after a while, you get better at it. And the LLM smooths out the odd mistakes better than you might think.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#47

Post by staticshock »

When high quality effort is applied to a tool, such as AES or the linux kernel, we intuit that it "hardens" the tool. That is, it makes the tool more correct, more resilient, less assailable, etc.

Similarly, when effort is applied to an open problem, such as the Riemann hypothesis or P v NP, without progress, it "hardens" the problem: it makes the problem feel more daunting to whoever takes a stab at it next.

Andrew Wiles, whose interview also hit the homepage today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49075264), couldn't just tackle Fermat's Last Theorem head on, he had to wait until a different, modern problem reduced to it, because FLT had gathered this mystique of unassailability through its 300 years of existence.

A thing I worry about is that as AI transmutes tokens into effort, it'll split the world into two: some problems will yield, making human effort entirely unnecessary, and others will harden to the point where human effort will feel increasingly less worthwhile, because "even AI couldn't solve it". I don't like this. AI is spiky, so I suspect it'll continue having major blind spots, and yet its mere presence will probably have a chilling effect on what would have otherwise been useful human effort.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#48

Post by TeMPOraL »

qingcharles wrote: post #44
_dwt wrote: post #22

I find that some of my friends and acquaintances have gotten obsessed with prompting style, "prompt engineering", which skills to use, which skills to build, "context engineering", and a billion other variations on "how to write smart things so the model does good". Friends, look at the prompts that Anthropic's own people are putting into the machine: > A few hours after the first message, we found that Claude was st…

It's counter to what sci-fi taught us using AI would be like. We never thought we'd have to feed it words of encouragement, we expected it to act more mechanically, like the computer interfaces we have been using, but here we are. It's kind of quaint, and kind of endearing.

Been watching the wrong sci-fi :). Star Trek had both AI modes as primary characters, in form of the ship's computer, and Data (TNG) / the Doctor (VOY). LLMs are actually great at acting as both, but I don't believe people thought much about what is required to make the "simpler" interaction mode of the ship's computer to work.

Or what would make automatic doors work like on Star Trek and not in real life.

The answer is: the system must obviously see much more than your prompt. It must have continuous awareness of you and what you're doing, so it can understand intent behind your short request (or action, like approaching the doors vs. passing by them) and "do what you mean" instead of act like regular computers today.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#49

Post by poidos »

heaney-555 wrote: post #42
ecshafer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So $1-10k in Chinese model time, thus why we must ban them.

If a Chinese model can do it for $1-10K, then why hasn't one? Why have all the mathematical (and now cryptographic) breakthroughs come from OpenAI and Anthropic? Is it possibly because the Chinese models are so benchmaxxed they can't make novel discoveries?

Don't know if one has or not, but a lack of announcement is not a lack of success.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#50

Post by arcanemachiner »

heaney-555 wrote: post #42
ecshafer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So $1-10k in Chinese model time, thus why we must ban them.

If a Chinese model can do it for $1-10K, then why hasn't one? Why have all the mathematical (and now cryptographic) breakthroughs come from OpenAI and Anthropic? Is it possibly because the Chinese models are so benchmaxxed they can't make novel discoveries?

They're a few months behind the frontier, which, by the way, only started making these discoveries in the last few months.
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