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Bitcoin
2026-08-29 14:30:00

Blockstream study weighs Bitcoin lattice signatures against quantum risk, favors Falcon-1024 if forced to choose

Blockstream Research has published a full review of lattice-based signature schemes for Bitcoin, comparing Dilithium, Falcon, and Hawk as post-quantum replacements for Schnorr and ECDSA. The report starts from a practical concern: Shor’s 1994 result showed that sufficiently powerful quantum computers could break today’s elliptic-curve signatures, so Bitcoin needs a deployment path before that threat becomes real. The study ranks candidates across four criteria that matter specifically to Bitcoin: on-chain cost, implementation complexity, deployment risk, and long-term development potential such as BIP-32-style key derivation. It argues that Bitcoin should target at least NIST security level 3 because outputs may remain unspent for decades. In that framework, Dilithium stands out for simple integer-only implementation and the strongest basis for future key derivation work, but its signatures are large. Hawk had looked attractive on size and memory use, yet a newly disclosed structural attack weakened confidence enough for the team behind it to withdraw the scheme from the NIST process. That leaves Falcon as the most balanced option in the report’s view. Its signatures are compact, verification is the fastest among the three, and its security assumptions are more established. Falcon still has unresolved issues, including floating-point complexity in signing, no practical key derivation method, and a standard that has not yet been finalized. Even so, the report says Falcon-1024 would be the preferred lattice-based choice today, while hash-based signatures remain the more conservative near-term path for Bitcoin.

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Blockstream study weighs Bitcoin lattice signatures against quantum risk, favors Falcon-1024 if forced to choose
Bitcoin
2026-08-27 12:01:38

Blockstream review says Falcon-1024 is the strongest lattice-signature candidate for Bitcoin, while hash-based signatures remain the near-term fallback

Blockstream Research has published a detailed review of post-quantum lattice signatures for Bitcoin, comparing Dilithium, Falcon and Hawk across on-chain footprint, verification cost, implementation difficulty, deployment risk and long-term usability. The report starts from a practical premise: Bitcoin’s current Schnorr and ECDSA signatures are efficient today, but Shor’s 1994 result means a sufficiently capable quantum computer could break them, so migration planning cannot wait until the threat is immediate. The study argues that Bitcoin should target at least NIST security level 3 because coins can remain unspent for decades, leaving funds exposed if future cryptanalysis weakens lower-margin parameters. On that basis, Dilithium stands out for simple integer-only implementation and broad software support, but its size is a major drawback on-chain. Falcon offers much smaller signatures and the fastest verification, though its signing path is harder to implement safely because of floating-point Gaussian sampling. Blockstream says deterministic, integer-simulated Falcon can address that issue at the cost of slower signing. Hawk, once notable for very small signatures and low memory use, has dropped out after Straznickas and Weis of Anthropic found a structural flaw that sharply reduced its estimated security. Blockstream’s bottom line is that if a lattice-based option had to be chosen today, Falcon-1024 would be the pick. Even so, the report says the conservative short-term path for Bitcoin is still hash-based signatures until the FN-DSA standard is finalized and production-grade implementations and hardware support mature.

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Blockstream review says Falcon-1024 is the strongest lattice-signature candidate for Bitcoin, while hash-based signatures remain the near-term fallback
Anthropic
2026-07-30 07:43:52

Anthropic says Claude found two cryptographic weaknesses without breaking real-world encryption

Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team said its internal model, Claude Mythos Preview, identified two cryptographic weaknesses in largely autonomous research runs, but neither result breaks encryption used in practice today. One finding targeted HAWK, a post-quantum digital signature candidate under review at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, where the model found a previously unknown symmetry in the lattice structure and cut the attack cost for HAWK-256 from 2^64 to 2^38. The work took about 60 hours and roughly $100,000 in API usage. The second result focused on a reduced 7-round version of AES-128 rather than the full 10-round AES. Anthropic said the model developed a fingerprinting method called Möbius Bridge that removed one enumeration step and ran 200 to 800 times faster than earlier meet-in-the-middle attacks. That effort took about three days and billions of tokens, with humans providing only limited guidance. Anthropic framed the results as evidence that AI can conduct cryptanalysis research, not as proof that Claude has broken modern deployed encryption. The targets were an unadopted candidate scheme and a deliberately weakened AES variant, leaving real-world systems unaffected.

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Anthropic says Claude found two cryptographic weaknesses without breaking real-world encryption
Anthropic
2026-07-29 12:15:00

Anthropic says Claude Mythos found new attacks on HAWK as crypto markets rise ahead of the FOMC

Anthropic said an unreleased version of its flagship model, Claude Mythos Preview, discovered two previously unknown attacks on cryptographic algorithms, including one targeting HAWK, a post-quantum digital signature system that had advanced to the third round of the U.S. NIST competition. According to the report, the attack cuts the cost of stealing HAWK’s smallest key from 2^64 operations to 2^38, or about 67 million times less work. Anthropic said fixing the issue would roughly double key sizes, weakening one of HAWK’s main selling points: compact keys and fast signing. The report also stressed that HAWK has never been deployed and that Bitcoin still uses ECDSA, so no live crypto system was broken by the finding. Even so, the development matters because a broad push toward quantum-resistant crypto infrastructure assumes that the replacement schemes are themselves secure. The newsletter also covered a range of market and policy developments, including gains in BTC and ETH ahead of the FOMC, public backing for the CLARITY Act from BlackRock, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Goldman Sachs, and SoFi, fresh ETF flow data, Zcash’s Ironwood activation, and a burst of meme coin trading activity led by PIPEDOG on Robinhood chain.

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Anthropic says Claude Mythos found new attacks on HAWK as crypto markets rise ahead of the FOMC
Anthropic
2026-07-28 20:45:38

Anthropic says Claude found new attacks on HAWK and reduced-round AES

Anthropic said an unreleased version of its Claude Mythos model uncovered two previously unknown cryptographic attacks, including one against HAWK, a post-quantum digital signature scheme now in the third round of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology’s competition. According to the company, Claude identified a symmetry in HAWK’s structure that cuts the cost of recovering a secret key in the smallest configuration from 2^64 operations to 2^38, a roughly 67 million-fold reduction. Anthropic said fixing the issue would require roughly doubling HAWK’s key size, which would undercut the compactness and speed that make the scheme attractive for blockchains and other systems sensitive to signature size. The company also described a separate result on a 7-round research version of AES-128, where Claude was asked to avoid all five established families of AES cryptanalysis and invent a new approach. Anthropic said the model eventually produced a technique called “Möbius Bridge,” reducing one of the nine key bytes an attacker previously needed to guess. It also reported that Claude broke 13 rounds of LEA, though deployed LEA uses 24 rounds. Anthropic said it disclosed the findings to the algorithms’ authors and relevant U.S. government and industry partners before publication, and coordinated the HAWK finding with NIST.

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Anthropic says Claude found new attacks on HAWK and reduced-round AES