LLMs Won’t Break Symmetric Crypto
Claude Mythos produced attacks on HAWK and a reduced-round AES construction, but neither threatens deployed symmetric cryptography. JP Aumasson argues that established designs have secure high-level structures, little exploitable mathematical structure for an LLM to discover, and decades of empirical differential-cryptanalysis testing behind them.
The realistic risk is implementation: better coding models may find bugs or make cryptographic misuse easier, while the primitives themselves remain difficult to attack. HN discussion largely agreed that battle-testing is the strongest defense, while debating whether models could eventually accelerate cryptanalysis.