Anthropic recently disclosed that its Claude Mythos Preview model discovered a flaw in the HAWK digital signature scheme. HAWK has not yet been deployed and is not the scheme Bitcoin plans to adopt, but this result serves as a reminder to the market that traditional computing and AI-driven cryptanalysis are rapidly advancing even before quantum computing truly arrives.
Current Bitcoin signatures are unaffected.
HAWK is one of the post-quantum digital signature candidates, originally intended to replace some signature mechanisms in web payments, online banking, and digital systems in the future. Anthropic stated that this attack took approximately 60 hours and cost about $100,000 in computation, reducing the expected difficulty of breaking HAWK's minimum parameter set from approximately 2^64 operations to 2^38 operations.
This research did not affect the security of current Bitcoin or Ethereum transactions. Both still use elliptic curve signatures, which this attack did not target. HAWK is also not on the list of proposed migration solutions for Bitcoin.
BIP-360 includes three alternative algorithms.
The BIP-360 proposal, currently under discussion in the Bitcoin community, aims to introduce quantum-resistant addresses for Bitcoin. This proposal incorporates three algorithms already standardized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and one of its design principles is to retain multiple alternatives in case one of them is weakened by future quantum or conventional attacks.
The accompanying BIP-361 proposal to BIP-360 suggests that the window for Bitcoin to complete its migration is narrowing as cryptographic attack capabilities improve. The Anthropic results further reinforce these concerns.
- The attack lasted approximately 60 hours.
- The calculation cost is approximately $100,000.
- The difficulty of finding the minimum parameter set decreased from 2^64 to 2^38.
Poseidon was less affected.
Anthropic also stated that the model achieved an attack improvement of 200 to 800 times over a deliberately weakened version of the AES encryption algorithm. AES is widely used in industry encryption scenarios, including wallet file encryption, so this result has also attracted attention from developers.
However, progress has been relatively limited in the area of zero-knowledge proofs, which are of greater interest to the crypto industry. Anthropic stated that the model improves upon the Poseidon hash function by less than 10 times. Poseidon is widely used in Rollups and privacy protocols and is a fundamental component of many zero-knowledge systems.
Almost simultaneously, Zcash completed an upgrade on Tuesday, enabling a new shielding pool, one goal of which is to retain resilience in the face of quantum computing. As AI begins to test these transition schemes more quickly, discussions about quantum-resistant cryptographic migrations are likely to continue to intensify.
