Mythos Attack Breaks HAWK, Eliminating It From Post-Quantum Cryptography Race

A newly developed cryptographic attack called Mythos has successfully broken HAWK, a candidate algorithm in the third round of the post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standardization process. The attack exposed a fatal weakness in HAWK that years of prior scrutiny had failed to detect. As a result of this discovery, HAWK has been effectively eliminated from contention as a future cryptographic standard. The PQC standardization process, overseen by bodies such as NIST, aims to identify encryption algorithms resilient against quantum computing threats. The Mythos finding underscores the rigorous and ongoing nature of cryptographic vetting, where even advanced candidates can fall at late stages of evaluation.