AI Weakening of HAWK Scheme Sparks Quantum Cryptography Concerns

A recent AI-driven attack has weakened one of the proposed digital-signature schemes to replace current web and banking signatures in a post-quantum world. The Anthropic Claude Mythos Preview model uncovered a flaw in the HAWK scheme, which effectively halves its smallest key strength.

The attack, which cost about $100,000 and took around 60 hours of computing, reduced the work needed to break HAWK's smallest parameter set from approximately 2^64 to 2^38 operations. This renders larger key sizes less attractive, as they would require significant resources to be compromised.

The results align with warnings that classical cryptanalytic attacks are rapidly improving, just as Bitcoin and other networks debate how and when to migrate to quantum-resistant cryptography.