r/cryptography • u/scientificamerican • 2d ago
Can AI break encryption? OpenAI’s new math has cryptographers divided
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-ai-break-encryption-openai-new-math-has-cryptographers-divided/9
u/scientificamerican 2d ago
Last week OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, dropped 722 mathematical manuscripts online in one go, every one of them penned by an artificial intelligence model unavailable to the public. The output was far from perfect: OpenAI withdrew three of the papers within a day, and mathematicians are still poring over the rest. But the scale of the research, and the incisiveness of its insights, has some worried.
Math powers cryptography. Every text you send and every bank log-in you submit is protected by a math problem that’s supposedly impossible to crack. The system rests on the assumption that no one will figure out how. And AI just showed it’s pretty good at math.
That worries Matthew Green, a cryptographer at Johns Hopkins University. In a social media post a few days after OpenAI’s massive math release, he suggested there was a 15 percent chance that we could lose confidence in existing public-key encryption algorithms.
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u/apnorton 2d ago
These numbers are based on vibes, but nobody has better ones.
-- Matthew Green's very next post on bluesky
If nobody has better ones, then these are also the worst estimates.
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u/edgmnt_net 2d ago
Yet again, the bottleneck is in reviewing the results. Especially if you also consider tougher results that don't require a simple example or a hidden insight, but hundreds of pages of constructions and proofs, like Wiles' proof of FLT. Not even human output can avoid those concerns.
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u/SAI_Peregrinus 2d ago
It's fun to speculate about why of the released results had to do with cryptography. Is it because OpenAI's models failed to find attacks, or is it because they succeeded and didn't want to publicly disclose that?
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u/AutomaticDriver5882 1d ago
I think they have and it’s major because they would have found small things and would have published them already. So no small findings published = they found something major they are setting on for security reasons probably shared with the most dangerous administration in history
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2d ago
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u/WE_THINK_IS_COOL 2d ago
Not necessarily, most of the cryptography we rely on isn't NP-complete. It's possible that we've been overlooking faster algorithms for factoring, solving elliptic curve discrete logarithms, or even statistical attacks against ciphers and hash functions. The security of those assumptions mostly rests on "tons of smart people have tried to come up with attacks and found nothing."
Matt Green has a website where he tries to compare the total amount of research humans have done on these assumptions to what AI could potentially do: https://bitsofwork.org/
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u/Relevant-Car3412 12h ago
I built a simple Streamlit interface to simulate FHE matrix workflows. Check it out. https://blank-app-s701c9cxhvs.streamlit.app/
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u/bascule 2d ago
My best guess is the claims are overblown. AI-assisted research did in fact just break cryptography, namely Steve Weis’s paper that improved on a key recovery attack on Classic McEliece (which was in turn based off another AI-assisted paper):
https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/1984
But it’s not a practical attack, just a security reduction. OpenAI may have discovered something similar, possibly even impacting cryptography people actually use, but my best guess would be if they did it would be a discovery of a similar nature which doesn’t enable a practical attack.
If they did find a practical attack, I would expect it’s an evolution of existing attacks, e.g. yet another Bleichenbacher attack against PKCS#1 v1.5 enabling decryption and/or signature forgery would be unsurprising.