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Ask HN: Can AI break cryptography?

• wmf 8y ago
  No, why would you think so?
  • kixpanganiban 8y ago
    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?
    • wmf 8y ago
      I'm not a mathematician so the best I can say is that cryptographic functions are specifically designed to be "unimaginable".
• monkeydreams 8y ago
  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.
  • kixpanganiban 8y ago
    > 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.
• sidcool 8y ago
  AI won't. Quantum computing may. But then cryptography will evolve as well.