Working with cryptographers, DeepMind’s AI agents cut the cost of forging RSA-1024 signatures and found a cheaper way to factor keys.

The post Google DeepMind’s AI Agents Make 1024-Bit RSA Keys Cheaper to Attack appeared first on SecurityWeek.

SystemD creator Lennart Poettering left Red Hat for Microsoft in 2022, but 10 months ago left to co-found Amutable a company that aims to build cryptographically verified Linux systems that stay trusted over time. It's FOSS calls it "a read-only, image-based system where every machine produces signed reports of its own state" — and signups are now open for a private preview: Before announcing this Linux-based implementation, Amutable had released two open source tools. tine, a Buck2-based build system that composes OS images; available under MPL-2.0, and Quarry, a TUF-based tool that distributes those images to machines; available under Apache-2.0. What Amutable Foundations brings to the table is a service where Amutable runs the images, update repositories, control plane and vulnerability fixes for organizations and individuals who operate their own systems. No license has been stated for those company-run parts, and the preview announcement does not say how much of Foundations beyond tine and Quarry will be open source. Software and configuration both ship as signed images, and a machine boots only what is signed. Because there is no package manager and no SSH or interactive shell, a change means giving every machine in your fleet a new signed image. Its images are reproducible, come with a software bill of materials (SBOM) and are built from pinned inputs of whichever distribution you pick, with tine being able to import packages from Fedora or CentOS Stream. Each machine sends a signed report that records what it booted, from the firmware and boot loader up to the kernel and OS, plus the configuration it runs... Amutable's control plane verifies reports from systemd-report, an experimental command in systemd 260 that the company helped build. It compares each one with the declared state and flags machines that deviate. A rollout only continues while machines can show they are in a good state... Amutable is signup formlooking for teams that manage Linux fleets and need to show what state each machine is in. It expects to start bringing the first 'design partners,' as it calls them, on board over the coming weeks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Indian certificate authority eMudhra said Thursday it will stop issuing SSL/TLS certificates days after researchers showed that the private keys securing eight of its certificates were so weak they could be reconstructed in under a second.

The announcement closes an incident where major browsers blocked the certificates and  Indian authorities launched an investigation.  

The company said its board concluded after detailed deliberations that leaving the business was the right decision for eMudhra and its shareholders. Company Chairman V. Srinivasan cited rising costs from data sovereignty and compliance requirements, along with competition from large providers that issue the certificates free of charge. He also said social media amplification of the incident brought scrutiny “out of proportion” to the unit’s place in the company.

“For many certifying authorities, SSL/TLS is the whole business,” the company said. “For eMudhra it is one part of a much broader digital solutions portfolio.”

The episode began last week, when a researcher notified Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla that the private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate certificates could be computed from the public certificates because they were generated with too little randomness. Security researcher Scott Helme recovered all eight on his laptop in less than a second, a task he said an AI agent later repeated from a single prompt.

Normally, a private key is a secret number so large that no computer could ever guess it, roughly 77 or 78 digits long for the type of cryptography used in these certificates. Each of the eight eMudhra keys was a whole number below 256, with one simply logged as the number 4. Since a certificate publicly displays the key it was built from, anyone could test every possible value in seconds, and such keys could be used to forge certificates and impersonate websites.

eMudhra attributed the flaw to an error in a key generation ceremony held April 2025, saying the mistake produced a second, weak set of keys that was published to browser trust lists instead of the intended ones. The company said its infrastructure was not compromised, that no data was breached and that none of the eight intermediates had issued end-entity certificates. Whether anyone used the keys in question is not known.

Chrome and Firefox blocked the certificates within hours of the report, Apple blocked them Monday and Microsoft on Tuesday. Mozilla removed the company’s root certificate from its trusted list, and Google said it will remove that root from Chrome in an update expected next week while it reviews eMudhra’s remaining root certificate. Go, Node.js, Python’s certifi bundle and several Linux distributions also shipped updates.

CERT-In, the country’s computer emergency response team, said it did not see any malicious use of the keys as of Wednesday.

The company said its other businesses, including digital signature and enterprise security services, continue to operate normally, and acknowledged reputational risks it cannot quantify.

Shares of ​the company fell 40% in the two days after the vulnerability was disclosed.

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Cybersecurity policy has long treated data protection as a systems problem: encrypt the database, secure the network, restrict access, monitor activity, and keep attackers out. All of that still matters. But those defenses have a major blind spot. Once inside the wall the data itself is at risk. Every time data is used, copied, or moved, the risk that a malicious actor will steal and expose the data significantly increases. Policymakers need to consider a tested method that reduces the value of sensitive information if it compromised.

Hospitals, banks, defense contractors and government agencies cannot operate on permanently unreadable data. They need to process records, share information, analyze intelligence and prepare data for artificial intelligence models. The reality is data moves. It travels through cloud platforms, vendors, backups, analytics tools, payment processors, software services, AI pipelines, and partner systems. Every handoff creates another place where information can be copied, cached, logged, and indexed, and another place where it can be mishandled or stolen.

This is the gap encryption does not close. Encryption protects data when it is stored or traveling, only partially protects it when it is transmitted, and does not protect data at all when it is processed. Once an authorized system decrypts information so someone can use it, the data becomes readable again. The defenses have not reduced the sensitivity of the information. If an adversary steals unencrypted data — or decrypts stolen data at a later date when quantum computers are readily available — the adversary now has the sensitive information.

All told, encryption is essential, but it’s also not enough. Washington needs to take that seriously.

One promising answer is vaultless, keyless pseudonymization. The phrase sounds technical, but the idea is straightforward: replace sensitive values with realistic substitutes before the data spreads.

A name becomes another name. A Social Security number becomes another valid-looking Social Security number. A payment card number, patient identifier, or address keeps the same basic format. Databases, billing platforms, and analytics tools can still process the record because it looks structurally familiar. But the identity is no longer exposed to every vendor, platform, or downstream user that touches it.

That is a different mindset from the one that dominates cybersecurity policy. We spend enormous energy trying to protect every system that might handle sensitive data. We should keep doing that. But in a world of cloud services, supply chains and AI systems that retain information in hard-to-track ways, perfect control over every downstream system is more difficult than ever. The question is no longer only about securing systems but also about making exposed or stolen data less useful to threat actors if they acquire it through any means.

Traditional tokenization models swap out real values for “token” terms and store original values — like names, passwords and credit card numbers — in a central vault. That can reduce exposure, but it creates an obvious target. If the vault itself is accessed, the sensitive values behind the tokens may be exposed.

Vaultless, keyless pseudonymization is designed to remove the single point of failure created by a central vault or master key. In a model assessed by our Transformative Cyber Innovation Lab at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the protected data could be restored only when the required parties authorized it under controlled conditions; no one party could reverse the pseudonymized tokens on its own.

The test showed the approach could preserve the format of sensitive contents while limiting access to the real values behind them. Unauthorized restoration attempts failed and were logged. Multi-party stakeholder authorized restoration returned the correct values. Intercepted tokens did not reveal the original data value. And the system contained a unique ability to revoke access to the token — regardless of where it exist — by cutting off downstream re-identification.

The assessment showed promise that sensitive data could remain useful for legitimate work while becoming far less valuable to attackers and unauthorized users. Using vaultless, keyless pseudonymization can significantly reduce the impact of a data breach or ransomware attack if the stolen or exposed data has no intrinsic value. 

The federal government should evaluate this methodology to assess what is required to make it work in live, real-world operations. Right now, agencies may be inclined to ignore this type of technology simply because it does not fit neatly into existing categories for encryption, access control, or other cybersecurity processes. This is a mistake.   

The National Institute of Standards and Technology should evaluate what the technology does, what risks it reduces, what new dependencies it introduces, and what evidence is required before it can be trusted in practice. NSA should examine the same questions for classified networks. 

Procurement regulations should also get smarter. Vendors claiming tokenization, pseudonymization, data-layer protection or quantum-resilient properties should have to explain whether raw data enters their infrastructure, whether any token-to-source mapping exists, who can restore original values and what independent review has been completed.

Cybersecurity policy has spent decades trying to keep attackers out. That work will never end. But we need this second objective: make sensitive data less damaging when it inevitably escapes. 

The post Encryption isn’t enough to protect data wherever it goes  appeared first on CyberScoop.

Hundreds of federal agencies should adopt an encryption tool to protect whistleblowers, veterans suffering from mental health crises and others from hackers who might target them when they reach out via agency websites, Sen. Ron Wyden said Monday.

The Oregon Democrat urged the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Office of Management and Budget to take steps to adopt Encrypted Client Hello — a cybersecurity technology that protects the name of the website visited by a user — in a letter to the two agencies. His office identified at least 350 sites that don’t use its protections.

While almost all federal agency websites are encrypted, standard web encryption doesn’t secure some website names, Wyden said, using reportfraud.ftc.gov as an example.

“As data travels across the internet, hackers and foreign actors monitoring network connections can easily see these exposed website names,” he wrote. “This visibility could lead to malicious eavesdroppers identifying whistleblowers, profiling cleared federal personnel, tracking Americans seeking crisis support, and mapping interactions between agencies.”

Wyden wrote that Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) is especially effective with Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) that connect hundreds of thousands of websites to the internet. For websites delivered by a CDN, ECH makes it so anyone intercepting user web traffic can view the network delivering the content but not the specific site.

Agencies using CDN infrastructure without Encrypted Client Hello include an FBI tipline that supports ECH but doesn’t enable it and a Department of Veteran Affairs online suicide prevention hotline that isn’t protected by ECH because Amazon doesn’t support it, as well as agencies offering things like national security personnel services and whistleblower channels.

Because of the lack of ECH protection, foreign adversaries might be able to identify someone submitting crime tips to the FBI, Wyden warned.

Wyden made two recommendations to the leaders of CISA and the OMB.

“CISA should require that civilian federal agencies enable the protections of ECH across all public-facing websites and inter-agency web systems,” he said. “OMB, in coordination with the Office of the National Cyber Director and CISA, should establish support for ECH protections as a mandatory condition for commercial cloud and network vendors seeking federal contracts.”

CISA and OMB didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter, first reported by NextGov/FCW.

Wyden’s Monday missive is his most recent aimed at improving security technology at federal agencies, following on the heels of a letter in July first reported by CyberScoop that urged feds to get rid of older, insecure, public-facing VPNs.

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IonQ announced Monday that it will acquire Elisity, a zero-trust network security firm, in an all-stock transaction valued at up to $1.3 billion that folds enterprise access control into the quantum computing company’s expanding cybersecurity business.

Elisity, founded in 2019, sells a software policy layer that governs which users, devices, workloads and AI agents can communicate across a network, independent of the underlying network technology. The California-based company reports more than 100 global deployments and says revenue and customer counts have doubled year over year, with no churn among deployed customers.

Maryland-based IonQ, whose core business is quantum computing, has been building a security arm around post-quantum cryptography and quantum key distribution, technologies intended to replace or supplement encryption that future quantum computers may be able to break. 

The combination addresses what the companies describe as a two-front problem: conventional attacks that operate at machine speed, and the risk that encrypted data could be retained until quantum decryption becomes practical, a concept known as “harvest now, decrypt later.”

“Our customers need to contain attacks today, put AI to work safely, and prepare for quantum risk,” Elisity CEO James Winebrenner wrote in a blog post announcing the deal. 

IonQ Chairman and CEO Niccolo de Masi struck a more urgent note in a release announcing the deal: “Q-Day is coming much faster than predicted,” he said, referencing the point at which quantum computers could break current encryption technology. 

Both governments and the technology industry have accelerated their timelines to adopt post-quantum cryptography over the past few years. This is partly due to a belief among executives in the U.S. quantum sector that Chinese scientists and labs have achieved breakthroughs across several different fields of quantum computing over the past two years.

The Trump administration recently issued an executive order directing federal agencies to boost the domestic quantum industry and move up internal timelines for migrating to PQC encryption from 2035 to 2030. Google, a potential industry bellwether, and other companies have opted to move their own migration timelines to 2029.

Winebrenner told CyberScoop those deadlines are easier to set than to meet. Enterprises will hace to start with identifying the information and operations that need protecting, then mapping the identities, communications and cryptographic dependencies that support them.

“You won’t replace every legacy system at once,” he said. The approach is to migrate what can be migrated, test interoperability and operational impact, and tightly control access around systems that need more time. Segmentation helps contain threats, he added, but does not replace the cryptographic upgrades.

Elisity’s planned role in that transition is to connect identity data to cryptographic decision-making. Its roadmap would extend its IdentityGraph product with cryptographic inventory and risk information, allowing customers to rank post-quantum upgrades by business risk.

The deal also reflects how AI agents are reshaping network security. Elisity’s platform already treats AI agents and other non-human identities as subjects of access policy, and the company has joined the Open Secure AI Alliance with priorities that include least-privilege rules for sanctioned agents, containment of agentic threats and control of unsanctioned AI.

Winebrenner identified the hardest unresolved problem in agent control as maintaining trustworthy identity and authorization as an agent’s task, tools and delegated permissions change. “Knowing an agent is approved is only the beginning,” he said. “You need to understand whose authority it is exercising, what it needs to reach right now and when that access should end.” His prescription is least privilege down to the task: “An AI agent should have access only to the resources its task requires, including when it interacts with older infrastructure.”

The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approval.

UPDATE: 10/12/2026, 4:25 p.m.: This story has been updated with comments from Elisity CEO James Winebrenner.

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Let's Encrypt "will shorten the default validity period of its TLS certificates from 90 days to 64 days, starting February 10, 2027," reports the blog Linuxiac: All certificates issued or renewed from that date will have a 64-day lifespan unless users explicitly select one of the shorter options already available: 45 or six days. Existing certificates will remain valid until their expiration dates. Let's Encrypt expects the final 90-day certificate to expire on May 11, 2027. The organization also confirmed no valid certificates will be revoked during the transition. To help administrators prepare, Let's Encrypt will introduce 64-day certificates in its staging environment on October 14, 2026, allowing users to test their renewal setups before the change reaches production. The move is part of a broader effort to improve web security by reducing how long compromised or incorrectly issued certificates remain usable... Looking further ahead, the organization plans to reduce the default certificate lifetime again, this time to 45 days in 2028. That makes the upcoming 64-day limit an intermediate step rather than the final destination. "Administrators using cron jobs or scripts with hardcoded renewal intervals should review their configurations," the article suggests. "Another upcoming change concerns domain validation. Let's Encrypt will reduce the period during which a previously completed domain authorization can be reused from 30 days to 10 days. In 2028, that period will shrink further to just seven hours."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The blog It's FOSS reports: You already know that Canonical has been selectively replacing Ubuntu's C-based system components with Rust-written equivalents that don't compromise in terms of functionality, most of the time. Now it looks like the distro's OpenPGP implementation is next, with Sequoia PGP coming preinstalled in Ubuntu 26.10. Canonical wants it to eventually replace GnuPG [the dominant Linux implementation of PGP, written in C] as the default toolchain, though that switch has not happened yet... [The Ubuntu 26.10 release notes say Sequoia PGP's default status will be a future goal...] [Sequoia PGP] was started in 2017 by three former GnuPG developers who chose to build a new OpenPGP implementation in Rust rather than keep evolving GnuPG's existing codebase. Sequoia PGP is designed as a library that other software can use directly, rather than a standalone command-line tool. sq sits on top of that for encryption, decryption, signing, and key management, and sqv handles signature verification, filling in for gpg and gpgv in GnuPG. Sequoia also implements RFC 9580, the 2024 revision of the OpenPGP standard, whereas GnuPG has continued from the RFC 4880 branch, pursuing its own newer extensions and the LibrePGP specification rather than adopting RFC 9580 as its primary standard. From the It's FOSS Weekly newsletter, which also notes that the founder of the It's FOSS blog has also created a Linux-themed game called TUXDLE — a variation on Wordle where all the answers are Linux terms.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Signature forgery." It's a new way to break RSA keys — and it doesn't require factoring. Ars Technica reports on new research using classical computing to "reduce the current RSA security level to an unacceptably low threshold" and lower the required computing resources by orders of magnitude. There's "a gap in current RSA-type security assumptions," according to a paper co-authored by University of California, San Diego professor Nadia Heninger, who argues that gap "gives classical cryptanalytic evidence in favor of moving away from RSA entirely during the current post-quantum transition." The practical risk is limited, but still significant. Applying the attack against the deprecated use of 1024-bit keys took a handful of months on an academic CPU cluster, significantly less than the current estimates for 1024-bit factoring that would require resources that only nations or companies with massive resources could achieve. Widely used RSA implementations are also safe. Nonetheless, the research has taken cryptographers by surprise... "If this result holds up under peer review, it would indeed be a conceptual break-through," Karsten Nohl, a cryptography expert and the head of innovation at Allurity, said in an interview. "RSA is as difficult to break as it is to factor large integers, at least so we thought. The researcher suggests that you can practically break RSA without cracking its key...." The key forgery attack Heninger and the other researchers devised poses an immediate threat to 1024-bit RSA. Even for 2048- and 4096-bit keys, the method reduces the security of RSA to unacceptable levels. The National Security Agency, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and European Union Agency for Network and Information Security require that any cryptosystem should provide a level of no less than 128 or more bits, meaning the operations required must exceed 2**128. The forgery attack drops these levels to 2**65, 2**90, and 2**119 for 1024-, 2048-, and 4096-bit keys respectively. These levels may further drop because Heninger's team did all the coding by hand and used no AI or GPUs in performing the forgeries. The researcher said these tools will "almost certainly" drop the security levels further. The attack works only against blind-signature implementations of RSA... Still, some real-world systems continue to use blind-signature, also known as textbook, RSA... The paper's authors and other researchers stress that the new attack poses little real-world threat. It does, however, drastically lower the estimated security of textbook RSA, and it does so in a way no one knew of previously... The new attack will further increase the urgency of completely moving away from the cryptosystem. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader phatrabt for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A cybersecurity working group at the G7 is urging governments to accelerate defenses against quantum computers that could break some existing forms of public key encryption.

The working group’s report, prepared in June at the G7 Summit in France, said organizations “can no longer afford to postpone” work transitioning critical systems and data to “post-quantum” forms of encryption.

“The quantum threat remains off the radar for many organizations and not properly resourced, with other security concerns taking precedence,” the working group report said. “Yet, a successful and collective transition to PQC can only be achieved if organizations understand that the quantum threat is an economic and business risk, and not merely a cryptographic risk.”

Instead, leaders in government and industry “must reframe the quantum threat from a distant future problem to a near-term threat that demands action across all sectors, not just critical infrastructure.”

The report acknowledged uncertain timelines for quantum computers, but identified that threats like harvesting current sensitive, encrypted data to decrypt it in the future do exist today.

The report also warned that quantum computers could compromise authentication and assurance mechanisms—by forging trusted data or stealing confirmation— jeopardizing secure communications and legal contracts.

The working group’s conclusions are largely in line with what governments have been recommending for years, urging industry to inventory and prioritize their critical systems and shift over to newer, “post-quantum cryptography” encryption algorithms.

These encryption algorithms, originally designed by independent cryptographers and vetted by the National Institute for Standards and Technology and National Security Agency, will be used to protect the government’s own systems and data from cybercriminals and foreign governments.

The Trump administration recently issued an executive order directing agencies to boost the domestic quantum industry and move up internal timelines for migrating to PQC encryption from 2035 to 2030. Google, a potential industry bellwether, and other companies have opted to move their own migration timelines to 2029.

But while that work has proceeded on schedule in some areas, like the federal government and the highly regulated financial sector, it has lagged in other industries where owners and operators feel they have more immediate concerns than quantum computers.

“We acknowledge that transitioning to PQC is not a problem for individual organizations to solve in isolation, but rather a collective transition that can only be achieved with early engagement, coordinated planning and informed decision making across the public and private sectors,” the working group wrote.

While often referred to as “Post-Quantum” encryption, the reality is more complex. Cryptographers believe the algorithms selected by NIST and NSA will stand up to attacks from a quantum computer, but since one doesn’t exist today, designing cryptographic protections against it requires some guesswork and mathematical estimation.

Estimates can be wrong, or overlook the entire cryptographic attack surface. Some NIST-selected algorithms have already been broken with traditional computers or AI. That’s why the agency backs multiple algorithms and concepts like “crypto-agility,” allowing organizations to quickly switch between them.

The G7 report was signed by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), The French Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI), Germany’s Federal Office of Information Security (BSI), Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Japan’s National Cybersecurity Office (NCO) and Italy’s National Cybersecurity Agency (ACN).

The post The G7 tells industry to hurry up and prep for post-quantum encryption appeared first on CyberScoop.

One of the most difficult obstacles to overcome in the quantum race will be the supply chain, given how diffuse it is, a top White House official said Wednesday.

“Supply chain is one of the biggest challenges in my mind, and really, the challenge with the quantum supply chain is that quantum is not defined by a single hardware platform,” said Brad Blakestad, director of the National Quantum Coordination Office within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

“If you look at the quantum computing technologies, the quantum sensing technologies, the networking — those are all different,” he said in a webinar hosted by Inside Cybersecurity and USTelecom. “And even within computing, there’s seven different modalities that use completely different components. So we have this not just one monolithic supply chain, but just a bunch of different supply chains that are kind of intertwined in various ways.”

Blakestad made his remarks a little more than a month after President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on quantum computing. He referenced proposed ways to address the supply chain challenge in one of the orders.

“The other major issue or challenge that we face right now is that we’re on the cusp of quantum exploding from a commercialization perspective, but we’re not quite there yet,” he said. “So there’s not the funding, the revenue coming from large-scale quantum companies at this point to really make the supply chain as robust as you would want. So thinking about it from the government perspective, it’s just [that] there are too many places that I would want to bolster and not enough funding to do it.”

Blakestad touted steps to help that along such as the government buying widgets from a company that makes them to certain specifications, or prize challenges.

The quantum supply chain isn’t just diffuse in the United States, an International Institute for Strategic Studies policy paper noted Wednesday. It’s “inherently international: no single country dominates the supply chain, whether specialised materials, cryogenic equipment, hardware, software, fabrication or algorithms,” the authors, Dongyoun Cho and Maria Shagina, wrote.

And a March report from the Center for a New American Security identified strengthening the quantum supply chain as pivotal to the United States seizing the benefits of the technology, citing gaps in the U.S. supply chain and reliance on foreign suppliers such as China and Russia. 

Supply chain wasn’t the only obstacle Blakestad mentioned as looming large.

“The encryption challenge is a real challenge, and we want to make sure that we are aware of when quantum computers will ultimately get to a scale that they start having these sorts of implications and move as quickly as we can,” he said. “So, just by owning the technologies, by owning the workforce, by making the United States the place that people want to come to be on the cutting edge of this technology, I think that kind of addresses both of those issues, and that’s what makes it so critical.”

Another difficulty is measuring progress, Blakestad said: “It’s also very, very hard to benchmark, and to know that you’re actually doing what you’re supposed to, what you are intending to do.”

The post Supply chain challenges loom large in quantum race, White House official says appeared first on CyberScoop.

Anthropic researchers used Claude Mythos Preview to find new weaknesses in two cryptographic methods, the company said Tuesday, including one that is being considered by the National Institute of Standards and Technology for both traditional and quantum computing.  

In a blog post detailing the work, the frontier AI company called it a “substantial” research advancement, but also emphasized that neither flaw affects software now in use.

“The attacks described in these two papers are the strongest attacks we have found to date,” the company wrote in the post. 

One of the weaknesses found was in HAWK, a digital signature scheme under review by the NIST as part of a search for encryption methods that could survive attacks from quantum computers. Working with a human researcher, the AI system found a mathematical shortcut, known as a nontrivial automorphism, in the lattice structure (a complex mathematical grid underpinning its security) HAWK relies on.

The discovered weakness cuts HAWK’s effective key strength in half, meaning key sizes would need to double to keep the same level of security. Anthropic said that change would erase much of what made HAWK an appealing candidate in the first place.

Ellen Boehm, senior vice president of strategy and AI innovation at Keyfactor, a digital identity and cryptography management provider, told CyberScoop that research like Anthropic’s proves that the NIST PQC evaluation process is working. 

She also said the research “elevates the importance for organizations to have visibility of where cryptography sits inside their enterprise, what business systems and processes it’s connected to, and the need for PQC readiness, if they haven’t already built a plan.” 

The other flaw was found in a weakened version of the Advanced Encryption Standard, or AES, the cipher NIST adopted in 2001 and the most widely used method for scrambling data in transit. Working largely on its own, Mythos invented a mathematical shortcut dubbed the “Möbius Bridge.” While real-world encryption scrambles data through 10 sequential layers, or “rounds,” researchers regularly study a simplified seven-round test version to measure security margins. In previous theoretical attacks, codebreakers had to check 256 separate values against a memory table, but Mythos created a shortcut that eliminated that lookup process entirely.

Combined with other optimizations, this discovery made the strongest known theoretical attack against seven-round AES 200 to 800 times faster. The attack is purely theoretical: It requires an impossible amount of target data — over 400 octillion messages — and cannot touch the full 10-round encryption protecting everyday software. Additionally, Anthropic pointed out that real-world systems remain completely safe.

Anthropic said it followed standard disclosure practices, notifying HAWK’s designers in June and coordinating public release with a NIST mailing list, and briefing government and industry partners beforehand. It also worked with researchers at ETH Zurich, Tel Aviv University and the University of Haifa to build a shared testing tool, called CryptanalysisBench, meant to let other researchers measure how AI systems perform against a range of ciphers.

The findings come as frontier AI models are being deployed by cybersecurity researchers in order to find vulnerabilities in all kinds of software. In June, intelligence agencies in the Five Eyes alliance warned that advanced AI models capable of wreaking havoc in the cyber domain are “months away.” However, a recent report found that despite the avalanche of bugs being unearthed, the threat level across the internet has not materially changed. 

Anthropic said it expects the same AI capabilities eventually to be applied to systems already in wide use, raising a separate question it said it has not yet resolved: how researchers, companies and governments should respond if a language model uncovers a flaw in a cryptographic system that protects critical infrastructure.

“As we develop increasingly powerful cryptanalytic results, it would be prudent to consider how researchers should react if a language model were to discover vulnerabilities in cryptosystems where attacks do have an immediate real-world impact,” the company wrote. “We hope that our work here will help launch these conversations.” 

Boehm said work like Anthropic’s further shows that enterprises should not rest on their laurels with any facet of their security apparatus. 

“AI is becoming a powerful tool for many things, including software quality assurance, code development, and in this case cryptographic analysis,” she told CyberScoop. “As AI tools become more widely and continuously used, it just elevates the need for enterprises to treat their trust infrastructure in an ongoing, operational manner versus thinking of it as a static environment that only changes every few years as new cryptographic algorithms are released.”

The post Here’s what Anthropic found when it turned Mythos loose on encryption algorithms appeared first on CyberScoop.

Pentest reports sometimes include bad information under a heading like, “Weak TLS Configuration” or “Insecure SSL Certificates.” This article will explain how TLS is supposed to work, common ways it […]

The post Testing TLS and Certificates  appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Sally Vandeven// TL;DR – Passwords stored using reversible encryption, even if they are VERY LONG,  can be trivially reversed by an attacker. Password cracking is quite enjoyable. It is very satisfying […]

The post How I Cracked a 128-bit Password appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

David Fletcher// The following blog post is meant to expand upon the findings commonly identified in BHIS reports.  The “Server Supports Weak Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS)” is almost universal across […]

The post Finding: Server Supports Weak Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Kent Ickler// TLDR: We use a custom dictionary to crack Microsoft Office document encryption.  Then we use a custom dictionary for pwnage in LinkedIn hash database. Background: I recently got […]

The post How to Crack Office Passwords with a Dictionary appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Logan Lembke // Step One: Power. Step Two: Enter. Step Three: ???? Step Four: Profit. In the security industry, we love our encryption. However sometimes, the complexity introduced by encryption […]

The post Two Button PWNage appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Ethan Robish // Let’s Encrypt is a free service that allows you to obtain a free (as in beer) SSL/TLS domain validation certificate to use as you wish.  Here is what […]

The post How Does Let’s Encrypt Gain Your Browser’s Trust? appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Gail Menius // My husband set me up with GPG and Thunderbird and it was too hard. Ethan said it was cool. Lots of people gave it good reviews. It’s […]

The post 5 Reasons for Mailvelope & Easy Instructions appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..