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Comment by LPisGood

9 hours ago

Private key cryptography is essentially unbroken by these models.

Normally "private-key cryptography" is the antonym of "public-key cryptography", which is to say, conventional symmetric-key cryptography such as AES or Enigma. That's what "private-key cryptography" redirects to on Wikipedia. This article is about Astra breaking a message encrypted with a private-key cryptographic algorithm, but one that was already known to be weak. I'm guessing that if you had messages encrypted with weak public-key algorithms it could break those too.

But they said new forms, I think that implied not the ones humans already discovered/designed

  • I see what you’re saying. It is generally harder to build a crypto system than to break one so I would find it hard to see potential from the design end before progress on the attack end.

    • > It is generally harder to build a crypto system than to break one

      It was harder to design Symmetric Encryption using e.g. AES-256 than to break it? As far as I know it's design is pretty straight-forward but there is no known way to break it even with all compute of the planet at your disposal (excluding trivial ways like exposing the key).

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    • Isn't the other way round? It does not mean that breaking one is easy, but it does mean that writing one that's unbreakable it's very, very, very difficult.

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