Encryption AI model discovers cryptographic weaknesses in HAWK and AES July 29, 2026 Share By SC Staff (Adobe Stock) Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview AI model has identified significant cryptographic weaknesses, leading to an end-to-end key-recovery attack against HAWK-256 and a substantial speedup for an attack on seven-round AES-128, according to a recent report by The Hacker News. The HAWK attack exploits a previously unknown symmetry in the lattice structure of the signature scheme, enabling a key recovery in approximately three hours and 42 minutes on a 96-core server. This attack specifically targets the HAWK-256 challenge parameter and does not affect production systems, and HAWK remains a candidate in the NIST post-quantum standardization process. The AES-128 attack, targeting seven of its 10 rounds, achieves a 200- to 800-fold speedup by removing a guessing step from an existing meet-in-the-middle attack. However, this attack still requires an impractical number of chosen plaintexts and does not necessitate changes to production software. Anthropic emphasized that neither finding impacts current security protocols, with the HAWK attack not extending to other NIST signature candidates or lattice cryptography generally. The research, largely conducted by the AI with human oversight for direction and verification, highlights the growing capability of AI in cryptanalysis. Source: The Hacker News SC Staff Related Data Security What Cloud, SaaS, and AI Data Security Actually Controls SC Media Editorial Intelligence, reviewed by Aparna Achanta July 24, 2026 The key is understanding where control assumptions break Encryption End-to-end encryption and the third round of the ‘going dark’ debate SC Staff July 23, 2026 A new paper analyzes the current controversies over end-to-end encryption (E2EE), which governments worldwide are seeking to limit for law enforcement and national security purposes. Data Security How to Build a Cloud, SaaS and AI Data Governance Program SC Media Editorial Intelligence, reviewed by Aparna Achanta July 14, 2026 Embed governance into the data movement process rather than applying governance after data has moved Get daily email updates SC Media's daily must-read of the most current and pressing daily news Business Email By clicking the Subscribe button below, you agree to SC Media Terms of Use and Privacy Policy . Subscribe Related Terms Byte Data Warehousing Diffie-Hellman Digital Envelope Digital Signature Encapsulation End-to-End Encryption Fast File System (FFS) GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) Signals Analysis You can skip this ad in 5 seconds