The only convincing argument here is that these things are battle tested (literally in most cases I would guess), with tons of research that never gets published because it's unsuccessful. A whole lot of human effort has gone into trying to break these things. A lot more than went into any of the math problems AI has solved so far. It's going to take a while before LLMs can equal and surpass that amount of human effort. And they might have to surpass it by many times to actually break these, if it is even possible, which is not certain.
What I have seen LLMs do recently is find what turned out to be very basic bugs in encryption and ZK libraries that for some reason humans never saw. In those cases it wasn't that the encryption algorithms were broken per se, but the the implementation was.
This alone seems very worthwhile.
The first one is not similar to the mathematical breakthroughs LLMs are making recently. There is a loss of information in mods and integer computations making them one-way. The second one requires simply increasing bit-length to match the increased computer power.
Most likely outcome will be that a security researcher is able to break one with assistance of / in collaboration with an LLM.
sghiassy•36m ago
Edit: I know I’m naive of anything security, by a lot a lot. But still, this isn’t surprising
dadrian•34m ago
what•31m ago
sghiassy•31m ago
I guess I only know asymmetric cryptography. I should learn more about symmetric…
Anyone care to boil it down for me :)
Edit: Isn’t this just advanced static analysis of any code base?
fluoridation•12m ago
sghiassy•10m ago
I wish I knew more in this domain.
It almost sounds like hashing with a salt
catlifeonmars•2m ago
OJFord•23m ago
LLMs are capable not just of calculating the most likely next word from a prompt according to a corpus of training text, but of doing so & feeding back into themselves, the most likely word now based not only on the corpus but on the basic prediction, a second (nth) stage of thought.
Yes it's all still token prediction, but it's predicting conversation between let's say not experts but capable speakers with all the information at hand. Undergraduates if you like. And such conversation can yield real results.
sghiassy•17m ago
I’ve even heard arguments that prediction is consciousness.
But using a Language-Model to break cryptography is still a stretch for me.
From the little I know, cryptography uses information theory to make sure that reversing the equation (aka finding the passowrd) is predictably impossible, given current compute standards for the foreseeable future (disregard quantum computer here though :) they’re not LLMs)