Sophie Schmieg, an expert in PQC at Google, said HAWK was already suspected to have weaknesses that would eventually be found. Still, the method for halving the key strength found through Mythos makes the candidate algorithm less competitive than existing PQC digital signature schemes such as ML-DSA and FN-DSA.

“Basically with this paper, HAWK is dead,” she wrote.

Less drama, but still kind of neat

The attack against AES produced less dramatic results. It’s based on an improvement found through Mythos for performing a “meet-in-the-middle” attack, which is used to derive a key under a chosen plaintext threat model, the best-known existing attack against AES. The technique inputs large numbers of known…