HAWK Post-Quantum Signature Withdrawn After Mythos Attack

A dated reading of what is claimed, reported, and independently verified in the current evidence.

Current reading

Readiness band and full integer triple

AI-assisted assembly · derived results

Readiness band

Emerging

Primary summary from verified readiness

Evidence strength Growing

Decision

Agent-assisted assessment · independently reviewed · 2026-10-01

If you need secure digital signatures, do not adopt the withdrawn HAWK candidate.

Why: Its developers advise against use following a structural security reduction. Practical recovery has been demonstrated for the challenge parameter; larger parameters also lost their claimed security margins.
Next: If HAWK appears in an implementation or pilot, plan its replacement and validate the replacement's security, interoperability and performance for your application.

Constraints

The developers declare HAWK insecure and advise against use.
The candidate has been withdrawn from NIST's additional-signature standardization process.
The structural attack reduces the security margins of the intended parameter sets.
Straightforward parameter expansion would make HAWK uncompetitive, according to its developers.
Physical implementations also require protection against demonstrated sampler leakage.

Evidence summary

AI-assisted assembly

Counts and dates only. Raw signals, private excerpts, trust records, and internal corpus material are not published here.

Publication record

Revision 4