Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude
anthropic.com
Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude
1–10 of 199 posts
Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude
#2> The multi-agent workflow led to interesting dynamics. For example, the key idea in producing this attack was discovered by a pair of workers working together. Both started investigating the idea; the first worker prematurely rejected the idea as infeasible, but the second found a way to fully exploit it. The pair kept exchanging messages, and eventually both agreed they had found an effective attack.
this is pretty interesting. the way it is written doesn't make it sound like the collaboration actually led to the discovery, but rather just the stochastic nature of each thread in the search. it would be interesting to replay and repeat the search (possibly with prior/context pertubations) to get a sense for how often it finds or misses the known working path.
Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude
#3[flagged]
Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude
#4Interesting 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.
Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude
#5I can already picture the faces of national security directors everywhere.
"The attacks described in these two papers are the strongest attacks we have found to date. We are sharing them after a period of consultation with US government and industry leaders. But as we develop increasingly powerful cryptanalytic results, it would be prudent to consider how researchers should react if a language model were to discover vulnerabilities in cryptosystems where attacks do have an immediate real-world impact. We believe answering this question will require input from academia, government, and industry. We hope that our work here will help launch these conversations."
And a veiled pitch to real cryptanalysis researchers: "Researchers at Anthropic then spent several hundred hours learning enough cryptography research to validate the model’s claim"
Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude
#6> The multi-agent workflow led to interesting dynamics. For example, the key idea in producing this attack was discovered by a pair of workers working together. Both started investigating the idea; the first worker prematurely rejected the idea as infeasible, but the second found a way to fully exploit it. The pair kept exchanging messages, and eventually both agreed they had found an effective attack. this is pretty…
Hypothesis: the pairing / collaboration makes it much more likely to find a fruitful road previously dismissed, because... that's what happens in fiction - including books, movies, and journalism (long-form "people stories"). It's a common trope: if one character dismisses a course of action, the plot demands the other character to take it.
In a way LLMs are, after all, trained to LARP people, including fictional characters and their tropes - this was actually exploited for jailbreaking to good effect in the late pre-agentic era (read: some two years ago). C.f. Waluigi effect. Not sure if it still holds for current models, but I can't imagine why it would not.
Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude
#7TL;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!)
Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude
#8> The multi-agent workflow led to interesting dynamics. For example, the key idea in producing this attack was discovered by a pair of workers working together. Both started investigating the idea; the first worker prematurely rejected the idea as infeasible, but the second found a way to fully exploit it. The pair kept exchanging messages, and eventually both agreed they had found an effective attack. this is pretty…
Yes there are two interesting derivative questions from this, assuming I understand it.
First, is it reproducible consistently at ~50% of workers? If not, what is the rate.
Second, are there any lessons to be learned here to increase the rate of success by changing models/weights/training?
The news by itself isn't really good news. But it could lead to good news. Maybe.
Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude
#9> But as we develop increasingly powerful cryptanalytic results, it would be prudent to consider how researchers should react if a language model were to discover vulnerabilities in cryptosystems where attacks do have an immediate real-world impact.
How would they react if a human were to discover vulnerabilities in cryptosystems?
Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude
#10I can already picture the faces of national security directors everywhere. "The attacks described in these two papers are the strongest attacks we have found to date. We are sharing them after a period of consultation with US government and industry leaders. But as we develop increasingly powerful cryptanalytic results, it would be prudent to consider how researchers should react if a language model were to discover…
It would be shocking if they haven't been pulling on these threads for as long as they've had access to these models.