Can AI Break Cryptography? What the Experts Actually Think

Dan Boneh (0:00)

All of a sudden, a new threat emerged in the world of cryptography, which is whether our AI friends can actually attack cryptosystems that we thought were secure.

Liz Harkavy (0:10)

The fear here is that the AI labs could break them if they are breakable.

Dan Boneh (0:16)

The fact that people try to break them and fail gives us more confidence. NIST is already standardizing many other types of public key systems that we can switch to. So if it turns out one of our assumptions broken, then we have backups, we just need to know.

Liz Harkavy (0:30)

Are there startup opportunities here and where a new company might be able to come in and help?

SPEAKER_3 (0:35)

AI is getting better at solving difficult math problems. Could it eventually break the cryptography protecting our banking systems, private messages and crypto wallets?

Recent results from OpenAI have sparked new concerns about the security of modern cryptography. In this episode, a16z cryptos Liz Harkavy is joined by Stanford professor Dan Boneh, general partner Eddy Lazzarin and research partner Justin Thaler to separate fact from speculation. They discussed what the recent breakthroughs actually tell us, how AI threats differ from quantum computing and why there's no reason to panic today. They also explained how AI could ultimately help make cryptography and software more secure.

Liz Harkavy (1:17)

Hey, welcome to our show today. I'm Liz. I'm joined here with Dan Boneh, a professor at Stanford and Eddy Lazzarin and Justin Thaler, two members of our team here at a16z. We're here to talk about a pretty big discussion that's going on right now, that's been kicked off yesterday by a tweet that a security researcher, Justin Drake, put out warning the crypto industry to start preparing for what he's calling bunker mode. Specifically around this worry that the advances in AI are going to cause a breakthrough or breaking of cryptography faster even than of a quantum computer might, which is normally the basis of the discussion that we have when we think about modern-day cryptography and what the state of the art looks like.

He called on big institutions to start thinking about moving funds and start thinking about this. A lot of that has been kicked off by some papers that OpenAI put out and different breakthroughs they had in mathematical problems that were previously unsolved and how that relates back to cryptography. Dan, I don't know if you want to summarize what those breakthroughs were or what those papers put out and how that kicked this off.

Dan Boneh (2:21)

Let's see. I guess the first thing I should say is, everybody calm down, don't panic, calm down. The world today is the same as it was a year ago, two years ago.

That's the first message. Now, I guess before we get started, I just want to make sure people are on the same page and that there are two stories that are getting entangled. I think we should first disentangle them. There is this long-going conversation on the thread of quantum computing to cryptography. This is not what this is about. Here, there is all of a sudden a new threat that's emerged in the world of cryptography, which is whether our AI friends can actually attack cryptosystems that we thought were secure using their super intelligence and so on. I guess the backdrop to all this is that around 700 papers were put up online presenting enormous progress in mathematics and computer science. I can't say enough about how impressed I am with the results that have been put on online. It's really quite remarkable to see all the progress. I remember my inbox blew up when this came online, everybody was asking for opinions and so on. So I started going through the list of problems that progress was made on.

As I finished the list, the thing that stuck in my mind is that, wow, this is incredible progress in mathematics, in computer science, but there are no questions here on cryptography. Not even on theoretical cryptography. In principle, there are lots of really interesting open problems in constructing positive development in cryptography, constructing new cryptosystems, maybe even in the theory, things that wouldn't directly be relevant to the real world. None of those questions were in the list of 700 problems that were posted. So you might wonder, well, does that mean the models are really bad at cryptography?

We don't know, and so I think one of the things that I would maybe like to start with is a call to the Frontier Labs to please tell us what have you done with trying to use these models to answer basic questions in cryptography. I guess the real question is what is the status, for example, on actually attacking standardized and deployed crypto? Have the Frontier Labs tried any of their models?