Note that this was for the public-key formulation. For the secret key formulation, it is mixing in the key, so it's not pure security through obscurity. It ma

Note that this was for the public-key formulation. For the secret key formulation, it is mixing in the key, so it's not pure security through obscurity. It may be -- probably is -- relatively poor cryptography, but it's not just doing a transformation of the plaintext without using the key. The public key part is in there mostly because of the formulation, not because we actually had any noteworthy success in training a network to learn pubkey. The result we mentioned was probably an anomaly, but it's an interesting anomaly to dig into more in the future. But, in general, the parent is correct. There are few guarantees about a scheme derived in this way. It's one of the things I think most interesting for future work: Can one formulate "can't be cryptanalyzed by a mathematically sophisticated adversary?" as an adversarial training goal? Certainly, it's solvable for the one-time-pad-like scenario we used, but what about for more general cases that permit key reuse?