Cryptographer Matthew Green pushes back on LLM cryptanalysis fears: best AES-128 attacks still need 2^89 work

matthew_d_green · x · 2026-11-03

Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matthew Green debated whether LLMs pose a real threat to symmetric cryptography, arguing that claims of symmetric crypto being more vulnerable than public-key crypto lack any real support — likening them to expecting a polynomial-time 3SAT algorithm next month.

He notes the state of the art: the best known attacks on AES-128 only reach 7 rounds (requiring 2^89 work and 2^105 queries), with ChaCha20-256 at 7.5/20 rounds — far below deployed security frontiers, making LLM-assisted attacks a non-issue for now.

Related event: Cryptographers Debate Whether LLMs Could Break Symmetric Encryption(6 posts)→

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