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- Hacker News
- Counter theory: No we won't.
- some already refuted speculation online about what this was, that i found informative & interesting & real to our times [edited, originally intro text read: "to clarify"]
> folks, Matt Green is not predicting that public key crypto will be cracked, he's predicting it will be regulated out of existence because LE will have no means to break into systems once we fix all the bugs https://bsky.app/profile/ver.ooo/post/3mxfbhrmk2c2u
socializer has already shown up in comments to correct this, and has a good twitter link from an hour ago, clarifying the post was really about ai math attacks possibly damaging some of the rare couple of cryptoanalysis attacks out there:
> These problems (right now basically MLWE and ECDLP with LWE and syndrome decoding as backups) have been extensively analyzed by humans. We felt good that the best known attacks were the best attacks. But we’re learning that human mathematical analysis isn’t the gold standard.
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thankfully i think it's unrelated what else has happened in the last 24hr:
> If you haven’t asked abliterated GLM 5.3 to hack the Internet’s core routers, then you’re a happier person than I am right now. https://bsky.app/profile/matthewdgreen.bsky.social/post/3mxd...
and then oh look, a couple hours latter:
Critical Cisco Nexus Flaws Let Unauthenticated Attackers Execute Code With Root Privileges https://cybersecuritynews.com/critical-cisco-nexus-flaws/
- by tux3
- Markets are down today over nonsense stargazing like this. If we lose cryptography, we lose everything in a sort of blackout level event like on Blade Runner 2049. It won’t matter what you buy or sell to. I see no signs we are even close to that.by Mistletoe
- I've always used key lengths that are significantly longer than anyone ever recommends. I don't really believe in the trade-offs that lead people to choose the shorter ones.
The only way I've been pressured to use a shorter key length is when the longer one for some reason is treated as an entirely separate algorithm that is randomly unsupported (looking at you, P-521)
by LoganDark - i hope we first lose people who post dumb essays on twitter.
at least he agrees that "he can't see the future"
there is just as much evidence for the opposite stance: AI can help us improve and formally verify every security reduction we use. As long as math allows some kind of trapdoor function, AI can help us produce the best crypto we can achieve from it.
by abhv - This is essentially a guess that P probably = NP.
Way more likely is that every existing cryptocurrency implementation contains bugs outside of the core cryptographic algorithm that would allow stealing coins without having to break that encryption. Cybersecurity is an arms race, as it always has been.
by swerve3815 - Just to be absolutely clear, the giant OpenAI math dump replaces two (2) already efficient probabilistic algorithms with deterministic ones. Neither affects encryption as it is deployed today (one is a quantum algorithm, and the other is factorization over prime fields).
I think it's fair to say that in the last month we have learned 0 things that would specifically confirm or disconfirm this stated view, either directly or indirectly. And that is not really Matthew's concern, anyway. His actual concern is that computers are really good at math, and if we point them at something like Module LWE or ECDLP there is a real chance that it (essentially magically) breaks them. See his statement at [1].
For better and for worse I think we are in a crisis of empiricism. As a community we are worried enough about the outcomes of breaking something like encryption that we're willing to admit statements like this one, even though we have no real, actual, concrete evidence that would indicate whether they're true or not. The line of thought Matthew articulates here (i.e., we can solve millennium problems thus "optimism [related to encryption] is a very opinionated bet") may be defensible from a risk management perspective, but it is absolutely not defensible as a statement of knowledge. Internally that's fine, but the public (including the technical public) is not going to make that distinction. They will interpret it as knowledge. That does not help us.
[1]: https://x.com/matthew_d_green/status/2108281944291393983
by antics