How AI Is Compressing the Cryptographic Threat Timeline

Abstract

This talk looks at three recent results that together change the outlook for cryptographic risk.

It starts with classical factoring. Two RSA Challenge records fell within sixteen days in September 2026: first RSA-260 (862 bits), then RSA-896. Both were factored with the general number field sieve, a method that is decades old, after AI coding agents ported it to large GPU clusters. The talk will explain why the mathematics stayed the same while AI-accelerated engineering on AI hardware still changed the economics of attacking legacy RSA-1024 keys.

The second part covers AI-driven cryptanalysis of post-quantum candidates. In July 2026, an AI research agent found a classical key-recovery attack on HAWK, a third-round candidate in NIST's additional signatures process. The attack exploits a Galois symmetry that halves the dimension of the lattice problem. It recovered HAWK-256 keys in hours on a single server, and the designers withdrew the scheme the next day. The same week, AI-driven analysis also improved the best known attack on 7-round AES. The talk will consider what these results mean for how much confidence to place in new algorithms.

The third part looks at AI improving quantum attacks themselves. ECDSA.fail (opens in a new tab) was an open challenge where human researchers and AI agents competed to optimise the quantum circuit for elliptic-curve point addition, the core step in Shor's attack on ECDSA. In eight weeks, logical qubits fell by 58% and the Toffoli gate count by 67%, compared with the published Google baseline. The talk will show how this widens the gap between ECC and RSA timelines, with elliptic-curve systems reaching the quantum threshold sooner.

The talk closes with what this means in practice for migration planners:

• RSA-2048 holds today, but RSA-1024 does not.
• Algorithm maturity and crypto-agility now matter more than any single scheme.
• ECC-protected assets deserve priority.
• Some parts of migration plans should change now.