Key facts
- Anthropic's Claude AI model identified a vulnerability in the HAWK digital signature scheme.
- The AI attack effectively halved the smallest key strength of HAWK, reducing computational requirements.
- The attack cost around $100,000 and took 60 hours.
- Bitcoin and Ether's current digital signatures are not affected by this specific vulnerability.
- The findings highlight the increasing speed of classical cryptanalytic attacks, impacting the timeline for migrating to quantum-resistant cryptography.
An artificial intelligence model developed by Anthropic has successfully identified a significant flaw in the HAWK digital signature scheme, a candidate for replacing current web and banking security protocols in a post-quantum computing era. The AI-driven attack, costing approximately $100,000 and taking 60 hours, reduced the computational effort required to break HAWK's smallest key parameters from an estimated 2^64 operations to 2^38.
While this specific vulnerability does not affect current Bitcoin or Ether transactions, which use elliptic curve signatures, the development underscores the rapidly advancing capabilities of classical cryptanalytic attacks. This acceleration challenges the timelines for migrating to quantum-resistant cryptography, a process already underway as networks like Bitcoin consider proposals such as BIP-360 and BIP-361 for future security upgrades.
The research also yielded improvements against a weakened version of AES encryption, by factors of 200 to 800. Smaller, though still significant, improvements were noted against Poseidon, a hash function crucial for many zero-knowledge proof systems used in privacy protocols and rollups. The findings from Anthropic align with concerns that cryptographic attacks are improving at a pace that necessitates swift action in adopting new security standards.