About Claude being used to find weaknesses in cryptographic algorithms.
Has this happened?
Yes 17 (13%)Not sure 82 (64%)No 30 (23%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About Claude being used to find weaknesses in cryptographic algorithms.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
I'm looking forward to seeing similar work on SHA-256. It would be fascinating if AI could discover previously unknown weaknesses in reduced-round variants.
It would also be interesting whether AI could discover new algorithmic optimizations for SHA-256 similar in spirit to AsicBoost[1].
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00575