
Ask HN: Can AI break cryptography? - kixpanganiban
I&#x27;ve been wondering about this for some time, and theoretically, it should (at least to an extent) be possible for AI&#x2F;ML to break some cryptographic functions -- or more concisely, decrypt some crypto outputs. However, is this proven to be true&#x2F;false?
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monkeydreams
Simple answer, no.

Trained AI works (in the simplest terms) by incrementally tweaking
coefficients in mathematical statements to best approximate a set of data
points provided. Generally it does this by being able to measure how close or
far away the AI is from the right answer in trainable cases and then
minimizing this distance.

For this to work in cryptography, we would need to have a formula which
already breaks cryptography in a general sense that we can tweak for specific
cases using AI.

What AI _might_ be able to do is to demonstrate previously undiscovered
relationships in number theory by throwing a whole heap of cryptographical
relationships at an AI to uncover an undiscovered correlation. The chances of
this are pretty small, but an AI might get lucky.

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kixpanganiban
> What AI might be able to do is to demonstrate previously undiscovered
> relationships in number theory by throwing a whole heap of cryptographical
> relationships at an AI to uncover an undiscovered correlation. The chances
> of this are pretty small, but an AI might get lucky.

Yeah this was what I was thinking. Train the AI on millions of crypto and
plaintext datasets on thousands of algorithms and it might uncover some hidden
numerical ways to relate the two together.

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sidcool
AI won't. Quantum computing may. But then cryptography will evolve as well.

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wmf
No, why would you think so?

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kixpanganiban
Well, AI can "imagine" the full contents of complex 3D scene simply by being
shown three images at various angles, so I thought there might be a
possibility to train an AI how to look for patters in crypto and plaintext and
"imagine" the function as well.

Any way you can point me to a paper (or otherwise) which explains why this is
mathematically impossible?

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wmf
I'm not a mathematician so the best I can say is that cryptographic functions
are specifically designed to be "unimaginable".

