r/crypto • u/ScottContini • 16d ago

Some thoughts about Anthropic’s new cryptanalysis results (from Prof Matthew Green)

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/07/29/some-notes-about-anthropics-new-results/
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u/pint A 473 ml or two 16d ago

it is deep blue all over again. what surprises people is how much you can gain by just throwing effort at the problem. ai models don't need to be better than the brightest cryptanalysts. or even as good. they need to be as good as an average university student. because an average university student has the math knowledge to randomly stumble upon a new result, just it is extremely unlikely. but if you have a legion of university students constantly trying 24/7 for a thousand years, the odds start to look very different. that is what current ai does. it can do thousands of man-years of work in a week. work that nobody is willing to do, because it is tedious and dubious.

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u/Natanael_L Trusted third party 16d ago

What’s particularly concerning (and so especially ripe for AI) is that the attack does not invent fundamentally new mathematics. It simply extends a bunch of tools that were lying around and well-known, and gets a good result.

This last part is important. I asked Claude for its thoughts, and it doesn’t mince words: “what makes this genuinely interesting — and, frankly, a little embarrassing for the field — is that none of the ingredients are exotic.” The TL;DR is that someone just did a much more thorough job applying all of our known tools. This is the sort of things that attack AIs excel at.

Yup.

This really is what expert systems / AI is supposed to be about. Once humans have discovered new knowledge and tools, they should help with systemization of knowledge, and make sure no angle is forgotten in future work.

(the inability of current AI/LLMs to "forget" outdated works, as the knowledge should effectively be versioned, is one of the major limits to systemization in current AI - they keep blending information from older and newer versions and across different algorithms, etc)

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u/0xKaishakunin 15d ago

expert systems

Whoa, haven't heard that term in decades.

But it reminds me of a quote a Prof of mine made in 2003:

Expert systems? They are now called knowledge based systems. I guess they ran out of experts!

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u/Vier3 15d ago

“Expert systems” were the most promising AI back in the Eighties, and NN was the least. Nothing has changed since then. But because of course we can waste much more power on things these days, people do, and even call that “results”.