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Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

anthropic.com

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Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#131

Post by Dylan16807 »

estearum wrote: post #130
Dylan16807 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't before. Then I started doing it just to show how easy it was. It doesn't matter what text box you're typing in. The ability to type as you'd speak is easy . Without any extra delays or issues. I hope you're not trying to argue that typing the same way into an AI prompt is harder than doing it into HN. It's just not hard in any situation. Voice isn't special.

You are struggling to hold the thread, I'm afraid. Have a good night!

I see. You've fallen into some weird pedantry to think what I'm saying isn't relevant to your argument. I hope you figure out my very simple meaning later, have a good night too!

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#132

Post by tedbradley »

_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…

With smarter models, Anthropic recommends laying off on giving it too much precise hand-holding, too. Early r/promptengineering had a bunch of the craziest prompts that usually did almost nothing or nothing at all. The subreddit turned into a place where every post was trying to sell some vibe-coded website "product."

Context management is still important, though. If you get to a certain amount of context, things start performing really badly.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#133

Post by hughw »

_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…

Contrast that interactive, misspelled prompting, which I can relate to, against the clear, but intimidating, prompting they published with that theorem proof the other day.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#134

Post by arcanemachiner »

throw10920 wrote: post #126
arcanemachiner wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That might be true, but it's irrelevant to the current discussion, which is arguing about whether or not Chinese models can do this now . One of the commentators above is arguing that it's not only possible but significantly cheaper (i.e. Chinese models are not only at par with frontier but several months ahead ).

Ah, sorry, you're right. I would be willing to be that Kimi could do a decent job today, but definitely not for 1% of the price.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#135

Post by ameliaquining »

IsTom wrote: post #85
ameliaquining wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That last sentence is not true; we have gotten much closer to building a quantum computer that can run Shor's algorithm. Organizations like Google and Cloudflare have declared a 2029 deadline to completely stop depending on the security of pre-quantum algorithms; hitting that deadline is going to cost a lot of engineering resources, but they're paying that cost because they think there's too great a chance that natio…

Have they factored 21 yet? That metric hasn't changed for some time.

That's not a very useful benchmark if the thing you care about is CRQC timelines. See https://bas.westerbaan.name/notes/2026/04/02/factoring.html (which the above post links to) for an explanation of why.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#136

Post by Chabsff »

alwa wrote: post #82
connorboyle wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I think knowing what you want (and being able to articulate it with adequate specificity, and detecting when processes drift away from it) is a real skill/field of expertise. I just don't think it's specific to interfacing with "AI."

I almost entirely agree with this. However, after coding quite a few large projects with LLM assistance, I can say with certainty that there is some form of "art" at play with regards to structuring requests for LLMs.

However, this "art" is not so much about how to present a given request to the LLM, but rather guestimating what the scope of the next chunk of work should be to balance getting as much out of the model as possible while avoiding the machine going off the rails.

Obviously, this is a moving target and different models perform differently for various chunk/scope of work. I look at my successful sessions with LLMs and I'm not sure I'd be able to articulate a clear set of rules to apply here. You just... gradually build a intuition for how much you can throw at the LLM at once.

That being said, I'm pretty convinced at this point that this is a property of the coding assistants as they exist today, and what "working well with LLM assistance" means will keep on changing.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#137

Post by JeremyNT »

alwa wrote: post #82
connorboyle wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I think knowing what you want (and being able to articulate it with adequate specificity, and detecting when processes drift away from it) is a real skill/field of expertise. I just don't think it's specific to interfacing with "AI."

IME "creating a good spec" (and good acceptance criteria) has always been one of the most valuable skills in... well, everything.

The machine is really good at working the spec on its own now, which is amazing, science fiction shit. But you've still got a garbage in, garbage out problem at the end of the day, which is pretty much the only hope we who work in software have of remaining somehow employed.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#138

Post by prettyblocks »

_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…

The difference is that Anthropic engineers have infinite tokens to throw at these problems for free. The rest of us do not and that's where optimizations in how the coding harness is used likely helps the most.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#139

Post by esseph »

estearum wrote: post #98
esseph wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people on the autism spectrum can have issues with speaking or speaking speed, but have no such barrier necessarily to typing speed. I'd imagine there's a statistically large number of people that meet that criteria on this website.

I mean we don't need to do any epidemiological studies here or anything. If someone hasn't tried it, they should. It's probably quite different from how they're expecting, might be great, and costs basically nothing. Try it for a few days and if it doesn't work in your workflow, obviously don't do it. But I have encountered many many people who raised these exact same arguments against trying it, then tried it, and w…

The thought of talking drives me insane but you do you, boo-boo :)

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#140

Post by ericpauley »

jrflo wrote: post #18
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…

That's not really that ridiculous. Looking at my ChatGPT stats my biggest day of token usage was 1B tokens (seeing how far Sol Ultra could go on a difficult problem with a quantitative goal and eval harness that it could run on it's own that allowed it to keep going until it succeeded). I blew through my $100 subscription usage in that one day, but with a 80/20 token blend that's $10k in API billing. So, $70k in a we…

Is that including cache reads? It seems improbable that (a) you actually filled 1000 1M contexts and (b) OpenAI allowed that in a $100 subscription window.
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