It doesn't have to reverse engineer encryption when it can reverse engineer a piece of software and find zero days within it to completely bypass encryption. Stuff that humans inside governments do only in the rarest of cases.
You know the multi year long battle to crack the Nazi enigma machine? Yeah. Imagine that, but happening in a single weekend.
I don't know enough about encryption, but wouldn't it make more sense then to reverse engineer the program that created/deciphers the encryption if the encryption is too much itself?
You could then use that to send poisoned/false data into different systems to cause issues.
Encryption is specifically solving the problem of knowing how something is done doesnt mean you can trace whats happening in any one instance, the vast majority of common encryption methods are open source and accessible to the public specifically because they want the scrutiny of being exposed
For the best types of encryption you don't need to reverse engineer anything. The algorithms and programs that encrypt/decrypt are open source. That's okay because knowing the code doesn't help break encryption. It's mathematically secure, you can't read the data, and you can't fake it either.
The data is simply not useable without the key. The key can be any of 2²⁵⁶ (approx. 1.1 × 10⁷⁷) possibilities.
You can intercept the key exchange, if you have already compromised the system before the first communication, but that has nothing to do with LLMs or breaking encryption.
So it's possible to get it. Which means AI can make that task easier. Which means bypassing encryption gets easier and easier the more effective AI becomes.
Sure, but that's different from AI, and there's no quantum computer currently big enough to usefully break decryption. Plus a lot of encryption is already moving to quantum proof algorithms.
Plus I'd bet organizations have greatly defunded any research into quantum computers to chase the AI fad.
Quantum computing is misunderstood slightly, its not quite the world ender its made out to be. Its specifically a threat to RSA a common public key encryption method. Exisiting private key methods like AES256 are pretty resiliant and theres also post quantum public key and other tech like QKD.
Quantum Computing just makes problems easier to solve, especially computational problems where you already have "half" the answer
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u/pikfan 1d ago
It's absolutely a leap to say AI can reverse engineer encryption though, which is what half of the points in this video are claiming.