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Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

anthropic.com

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Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#101

Post by hgoel »

connorboyle wrote: post #78
_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…

Been skeptical for quite some time that "using AI" is a real skill/genuine field of expertise. I think I need to start sharing that skepticism more loudly and publicly! (I'll caveat that by saying I think machine learning fundamentals are useful for evaluating any estimator. And an ML background can be good to give one an appreciation of how hard some tasks are to estimate, such as machine translation, summarization,…

It's still a skill for now. Prompt engineering specifically is perhaps not as much of a skill anymore, but I think there's a level of skill involved in understanding and/or anticipating when a model is going off the rails.

Some people struggle to effectively use AI because they either have to spend a lot of time reading and thinking about the response or they have a hard time noticing when the model is subtly going off the rails. Others use it to good effect because they can anticipate which tasks would be better handled manually, or are good at catching that the way the model is describing something subtly indicates a misunderstanding.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#102

Post by reader9274 »

Leading with: "identifies a new way to attack round-reduced AES, the most widely used symmetric cipher"

Hidden in deeper paragraphs later:

"To be clear, neither of these results has a practical impact on today’s computer systems; no production software will have to change as a result"

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#103

Post by vessenes »

adrian_b wrote: post #57
Retr0id wrote: post #7

TL;DR: They marginally improved on the best known academic attack on 7-round AES-128 (which normally uses 10 rounds - you do not need to worry about AES being broken). The attack on HAWK is perhaps more interesting - they were able to halve the effective key length. HAWK is a candidate for NIST standardisation. It has been studied academically, but isn't really deployed anywhere (because it hasn't been standardised!)

It should be noted that the attack is not only an attack against a weakened AES, but it is also a chosen-plaintext attack. It is standard in cryptography to analyze ciphers under this kind of attack, which is stronger than normal attacks, because a cipher that resists to a stronger attack will also resist to weaker attacks, so using the strongest possible attack increases the confidence in a cipher. While using the s…

I do not believe that chosen plaintext attacks are obsolete. Any time you have an encrypting oracle setup in which the scheme itself does not require some sort of modification of the plaintext itself, you can reach for a chosen plaintext attack. I believe mitigations are known and can be applied or required in standards, but I don't think it's a 'dead' area of cryptanalytic research -- there's so much devil in the details of implementations around the world for these schemes that it seems almost impossible to imagine.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#104

Post by tptacek »

AsyncBanana wrote: post #74
_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…

"prompt engineering" in general just boggles my mind. It is amazing how all of this investment has just created software that doesn't follow instructions well.

It's a tiny fraction of the amount of work it takes to get people to build software to specifications. There is an entire professional discipline dedicated to this, and we're here just giving a name to the bucket of tools you use to get LLMs to do some of the same things.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#105

Post by vessenes »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #11
Stevvo wrote: post #4

Interesting they are still using "Mythos Preview" instead of "Mythos 5"; I had read from others who had access to both that Mythos 5 is less capable.

Going to guess it's more available or less overconstrained. See e.g. Fable, which is much better than Opus 4.8 and possibly than Opus 5... in the rare case of a task it doesn't punt on because of its safety guardrails.

Seriously. I asked for an elliptic curve math course to be generated last week and Fable instantly opted out and downgraded.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#106

Post by QwenGlazer9000 »

pas wrote: post #95
8note wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think id almost worry more that ai can solve problems in latent space that it cant translate back to tokens because decoding ruins it, and that we wont be able to come up with concepts that we can map to properly decode those solutions in a way people understand

... what is understanding of mathematics anyway? if some AI result helps a mathematician to solve more problems I would say then that it gave them some understanding, but just as there are proofs that span hundreds of pages it's likely that soon proofs will be long Lean programs and studying them will be part of mathematics, just as studying Go played by AI. (see the open (Lean) label for Erdos problems https://maths…

https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/the-fall-of-the-theorem-e...

This blog post talks in depth about what you're talking about. It may interest you. It even talks about the future where math proofs are just Lean programs, and why that won't necessarily be a good thing.

It's worth a read, even if it's long AF.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#107

Post by Dylan16807 »

estearum wrote: post #99
charcircuit wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean how you never write? You can just write what for want to say instead of saying it out loud. It is not a special skill, it's no different than how you write a message, just that you don't hit backspace to go back and correct things.

Correct, it's no different from how you normally write, except for the ways in which it is. We agree.

When you're making a big deal out of it being "much harder" because it's "how you never write" and they're saying that's just "not hitting backspace"? No, you don't agree.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#108

Post by estearum »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #107
estearum wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, it's no different from how you normally write, except for the ways in which it is. We agree.

When you're making a big deal out of it being "much harder" because it's "how you never write" and they're saying that's just "not hitting backspace"? No, you don't agree.

How frequently do you write in a stream of consciousness and not hit backspace?

Maybe give a ballpark estimate of characters typed per week in this manner versus characters typed where you are doing some combination of: 1) thinking about what you're writing before you write it, 2) punctuating and formatting correctly, or 3) correcting your writing output?

Ridiculous proposition. And I type correctly at 110+ wpm.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#109

Post by Dylan16807 »

estearum wrote: post #108
Dylan16807 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're making a big deal out of it being "much harder" because it's "how you never write" and they're saying that's just "not hitting backspace"? No, you don't agree.

How frequently do you write in a stream of consciousness and not hit backspace? Maybe give a ballpark estimate of characters typed per week in this manner versus characters typed where you are doing some combination of: 1) thinking about what you're writing before you write it, 2) punctuating and formatting correctly, or 3) correcting your writing output? Ridiculous proposition. And I type correctly at 110+ wpm.

How often I do it doesn't matter because it's such a trivial thing to switch. If you're gonna "try it for a few weeks" the part of you that has to learn the typing-specific parts of that method is about 1% of the difficulty.

It's really easy to ignore typos. And the way you have to approach thinking and correcting is the same whether you're typing or voicing.

If you can't just type the way you would just talk, and you find it notably hard, it's you that's being ridiculous.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#110

Post by estearum »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #109
estearum wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How frequently do you write in a stream of consciousness and not hit backspace? Maybe give a ballpark estimate of characters typed per week in this manner versus characters typed where you are doing some combination of: 1) thinking about what you're writing before you write it, 2) punctuating and formatting correctly, or 3) correcting your writing output? Ridiculous proposition. And I type correctly at 110+ wpm.

How often I do it doesn't matter because it's such a trivial thing to switch. If you're gonna "try it for a few weeks" the part of you that has to learn the typing-specific parts of that method is about 1% of the difficulty. It's really easy to ignore typos. And the way you have to approach thinking and correcting is the same whether you're typing or voicing. If you can't just type the way you would just talk, and yo…

But it's literally not. You already correct yourself and revise your speech in an append-only rolling edit. You do it all day every day for decades.

Versus never writing in this way.

Have you tried the voice-based prompting, as I'm describing?

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