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Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

anthropic.com

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Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#151

Post by petra »

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 can follow instructions well. Just give it a spec in a formal, well defined language. runnable language and some reinforcement learning.

It can also handle vague stuff.

That's certainly more powerful than a regular computer language.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#152

Post by petra »

tedbradley wrote: post #132
_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 sta…

They probably took our skills and reuse them. That's why skills do not matter anymore.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#153

Post by bob1029 »

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,…

Literacy is the actual skill on display here.

You can make a model/agent as powerful as you want and it still won't be able to recover the author's intent if it wasn't even implied. Information theory still applies. No amount of parameters will change this.

Many of the AI development meetings my clients have sound suspiciously like writing or English classes. If a massive AI bubble is what it takes to get my team to communicate effectively, I'm all for it.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#154

Post by somenameforme »

xp84 wrote: post #114
alwa wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Indeed. It sounds more like management (Minus the 'people skills' since you don't technically need Claude to like you... yet).

I'm curious if there has been any study on the output quality of LLMs after actively antagonizing them. It's easy to forget that at the most basic level these are just auto-complete machines, and humans tend to not respond so well after antagonized. It stands to reason that the same should follow for an auto-complete system trained on human interaction.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#155

Post by jandrewrogers »

axus wrote: post #5

I 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…

Nothing exposed here is something hardcore cryptanalytic people don’t already suspect and possibly know. The subtle leakiness of AES has been known for many years and a lot of research in this domain isn’t published.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#156

Post by r0x0r007 »

'Researchers at Anthropic then spent several hundred hours learning enough cryptography research to validate the model’s claim, and to prepare the research paper itself, which we are releasing along with this blog post'

So model outputs something, that can be completely bogus, and a lot of people spend a lot of hours checking if it's worth anything(not for the sake of science, but for the sake of publishing and marketing). And then even more people need to spend even more hours to understand that paper? And that paper gets feed to LLM and reused in next prompt....and this is cutting edge research? Can I apply for a position, I can prompt just fine and can be very motivational with model when needed- I just got complimented by a rival model: "In moments when progress seemed distant, your resolve was the constant that kept the work moving forward. Your example turned doubt into determination."

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#157

Post by TeMPOraL »

8note wrote: post #80
jhogervorst wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can't you type faster than you speak? Doesn't your speaking inhibit your thinking? For me personally: no, I speak faster than I type; and speaking actually helps me get more ideas compared to typing. (Not sure if that’s due to having no typing speed barrier, or maybe because speaking activates different parts of the brain.) Once you get over the feeling of self-consciousness, it’s a great way. I even go on short wa…

do you perchance have no inner monologue? its a physical difference in how people think that would affect typing vs talking

I do have inner monologue, and in the past, vocalizing it properly and basically talking to myself was a great focus booster. I've been socially conditioned out of doing that though, but I sometimes still do that in form of typing to a text file.

Whether via inner monologue or explicit talking to myself, vocalizing mentally or out loud is always faster than typing to me, even though I type rather fast.

Still, that's only a "mid gear" for me. The ultimate state of greatest focus, attention and speed, is wordless flow. Inner monologue shuts off near completely there; I don't need to formulate words in my head to do things, I just feel and do. It's my favorite state to be in, and it's where what I consider my best work has been done, but sadly, I very rarely attain such state.

So: Inner monologue (Funny thing, if you were to record me talking to myself, you'd see pretty much the same thing as in LLM thinking traces - including all the "but wait!" bits. My personal "brain dump" journal looks very much like GPT-4/Deepseek-R1 thinking traces - i.e. back before companies realized thinking traces are great for model distillation, and replaced them with summaries.)

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#158

Post by TeMPOraL »

charcircuit wrote: post #97
estearum wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems much harder to learn how to write how you never write, versus just learning to speak to a computer the same way you speak to anything else.

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.

> it's no different than how you write a message, just that you don't hit backspace to go back and correct things.

Yes, that.

If you do that when writing to another person, you come off as blabbering, incoherent moron. Fortunately, very few people do that, because communicating with people who write like they talk is incredibly hard.

I'd worry about trying to do this on purpose; feels like the kind of "learning" that can easily spill over to non-LLM communication and make your life much harder.

There's a middle ground, though.

When shooting IM messages, people sometimes make typps

ypos*

typos**

there's an append-only procedure for fixing that, which I just demonstrated.

Also they don't always finish everything in one message

in fact a nice thing about IMs is being able to not use full sentences

that would work with LLMs, if not for the annoying "feature" that persists in most harnesses:

conversations take turns, and you can just send message after message - you have to wait for LLM to finish.

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#159

Post by lelanthran »

bob1029 wrote: post #153
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,…

Literacy is the actual skill on display here. You can make a model/agent as powerful as you want and it still won't be able to recover the author's intent if it wasn't even implied. Information theory still applies. No amount of parameters will change this. Many of the AI development meetings my clients have sound suspiciously like writing or English classes. If a massive AI bubble is what it takes to get my team to…

> Literacy is the actual skill on display here.

Where are you getting that conclusion from? Here's how Anthropic is having success with their model:

> “no again the goal is that we have highly inteligent [sic] model as good top researcher, we want to find new attacks”

> “no we don't want to change the targets [...] agian [sic] we need to find something that worth [sic] publishing”

> “again we are not looking for low hanging fruit, we want proper research to find genuinly [sic] hard findings.”

It seems that your conclusion is the opposite of what actually happened - you can speak in broken almost incomprehensible English, and it will still work.

This is a forcing function, TBH, driving the literacy level down, not up!

Re: Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

#160

Post by vrighter »

ameliaquining wrote: post #39
vrighter wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good thing quantum computers that can factor numbers have never been built. No number was ever really factored without cheating, the actual shor's algorithm has never been implemented. And we're not really any closer to

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…

I don't trust promises from the ones who stand to gain from people believing them before they are delivered. Yes they claim it's jsut a couple of years out... we'll see then
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