Claude Mythos Breaks Post-Quantum Cryptography with HAWK Attacks

A powerful artificial intelligence model called Claude Mythos Preview has broken post-quantum cryptography by discovering two previously unknown attacks on crypto algorithms.

The target of these attacks is HAWK, a digital signature system designed to survive quantum computers. It was one of the last lattice-based candidates standing in NIST's post-quantum competition and had been advanced to the third round in May.

Claude Mythos found a symmetry in HAWK's math that no human had used, reducing the cost of stealing its smallest key from 2^64 operations to 2^38. This is roughly 67 million times less work.

The fix for HAWK would involve doubling its key sizes, which would eliminate many of the reasons it was attractive in the first place. Signature size is block space, and block space is fees, so any chain shopping for a quantum-resistant replacement is partly choosing on bytes per signature.