Measuring LLMs’ Ability to Perform Cryptanalysis

There’s new benchmark measuring AI’s ability to perform mathematical cryptanalysis. Anthropic’s frontier model actually found new attacks. The benchmark: “CryptanalysisBench: Can LLMs do Cryptanalysis?” The idea is to benchmark the ability of LLMs to discover new mathematical cryptanalytic attacks against a series of historical algorithms. Abstract: Cryptanalysis—the task of finding attacks against cryptographic schemes—its at the intersection of mathematical reasoning and cybersecurity, two areas where LLMs have advanced fastest. Cryptanalysis represents both a clean testbed for frontier reasoning (as practical attacks can be automatically verified) and a domain with unusually high stakes, since the primitives under study underpin our digital security. In this paper we ask whether LLMs can do cryptanalysis, and find that the answer is increasingly yes. We introduce CryptanalysisBench, 191 tasks across six families of cryptographic primitives (