Whether AI is weakening the cryptography we rely on: attacks and cryptanalysis found or sped up by AI, AI mathematics with a bearing on lattices, elliptic curves, hashes and number theory, parameters revised and schemes dropped because of it, and what cryptographers and protocol designers say about the threat. Topics and rules ↓
Lavit, Seinturier, and Véron show a transformer-based model identifies Goppa codes from random linear codes by exploiting low-weight-row artifacts and combinatorial properties, not hidden algebraic structure. The finding suggests AI can extract general code properties relevant to code-based cryptography security even after removing training artifacts.
Anthropic showed Claude reconstructed the public seed behind P-256, a NIST elliptic curve used for Ethereum passkey signing, by initializing an old C-library generator with timestamp Aug. 16, 1997, 01:52:34 UTC and advancing to candidate 1,842. This resolves longstanding concerns about whether NSA-supplied curve seeds contained deliberate backdoors.
Researchers released LeanPRM, a dataset of 152,000 labeled proof steps across 10,634 formal Lean proofs, generated automatically without human annotation. This removes the bottleneck for training AI verifiers on mathematical proofs, enabling scalable step-level verification of AI-generated proofs.
Lavit, Seinturier, and Véron analyzed how a transformer model distinguishes Goppa codes from random linear codes. The model exploits low-weight-row artifacts in training data and combinatorial properties derived from minimum distance constraints, not hidden algebraic structure. After removing training artifacts, the distinguisher retained significant accuracy by relying on pairwise XOR patterns between generator matrix rows. When tested on random matrices satisfying both minimum distance and XOR constraints, the model lost most predictive power. The finding shows transformers can extract general code properties relevant to code-based cryptography security, suggesting AI may identify structural weaknesses in Goppa code implementations even without access to algebraic internals.