Comment by LPisGood
9 hours ago
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.
9 hours ago
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).
Yes, it was. An attack only needs to work one way, but an encryption standard must resist all attacks.
There are many examples of would be crypto algorithms that died on the vine because an attack was found. It is often recommended for beginners to study breaking cryptographic algorithms long before they attempt to create them.
It didn't take 25 years to come up with Symmetric Encryption and AES but even though people try extensively to break it for the last 25 years no-one has come even close to anything that is not brute force (which is practically impossible even assuming very generous computing resources). So at least in that case coming up with the encryption seems to be a very solvable problem but breaking it seems close to impossible.
Building a crypto system has so many footguns, I'd be amazed if it could build one that stands up to attack
I think it’s all about the harness. If someone can find a way to create an iterative loop, with a good validator, I wouldn’t be too surprised if an LLM can end up with a solution. So far that’s how pretty much all problems have been solved by LLMs. That’s a very big if though!
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.
Yes it is; that’s what I was thinking when I started to comment but somehow I ended up reversing course. Comment is appropriately edited now.