Comment by derektank
2 hours ago
So, does anyone have any intuition for how concerned we should be that one of leading foundation models will be able to successfully attack the gold standard symmetric and public key encryption algorithms (AES, ChaCha, ECDH, Kyber, etc.) in the next few years? As a consumer of crypto that doesn’t understand the mathematics deeply, I’m getting kind of nervous that we’re going to wake up one day to find that the backbone of TLS has been shattered.
It's unlikely that any of the modern cryptographic primitives will break over night.
First, modern encryption isn't susceptible to "this one weird trick!" like the early days. ChaCha isn't even a cipher. It's a key stretcher. Which means, even if you broke the math behind ChaCha, its inherent complexity means its still widely dispersing the original key across the cipherstream. There just won't ever be enough key material recovered per cipherstream block to be a concern for anybody.
Take a strong password, encrypt all of your emails over your whole life with it, and I'll bet hard cash no break of ChaCha will ever recover that password.
I have zero concern for modern encryption being broken in any meaningful way.
Public key crypto on the other hand, that's _ripe_ for breaking. Most all of it is built on assumed "hard" math. AI could easily break that, and I expect it to. And public key crypto is all used in very transparent algorithms that, once the math breaks, fully expose themselves. So record HTTPS traffic today, crack the public key crypto later, and you can decrypt them easily.
That said, I would expect a break on public key math to occur _steadily_. i.e. an AI might find a solution to the hard math, but the solution itself will be intractable in practice. Then maybe next year's AI reduces the complexity of the solution, so maybe a supercomputer could factor ten keys a year. The year after that you get a million keys cracked per year. And so forth. Nothing close to overnight.
Meanwhile, if we have AI that is capable enough to crack that math, we also have AI capable enough to both invent better math and rapidly deploy that latest HTTPS and such globally.
The entire point of having multiple ciphers is that some will break.
Did the world end with any previous one breaking?
It’s incredible and awesome if AES GCM has a flaw found with an AI now, Chacha20 could be a direct or nearly-direct replacement.
The sooner a cipher breaks, the better.
Sure, but in an era where major unsolved mathematics problems start getting knocked out one by one, what if attacks for all of them are identified in the space of a couple of years?
I don’t doubt that we could come up with new crypto algorithms equally as fast, but how do you trust that they are resilient (or even just implemented correctly) without an extended vetting period?
What If…
Ima stop you there. Instead, you might be happy to be aware that outside of AI concerns, “quantum safe” (or assumed so) ciphers are all the rage. So this is already a likely solved problem with the next generation of encryption… until this are AI models running on quantum machines I guess!