I think we might lose public key cryptography (twitter.com)

I think it's fair to say that in the last month we have learned 0 things that would specifically confirm or disconfirm this stated view, either directly or indirectly. And that is not really Matthew's concern, anyway. His actual concern is that computers are really good at math, and if we point them at something like Module LWE or ECDLP there is a real chance that it (essentially magically) breaks them. See his statement at [1].

For better and for worse I think we are in a crisis of empiricism. As a community we are worried enough about the outcomes of breaking something like encryption that we're willing to admit statements like this one, even though we have no real, actual, concrete evidence that would indicate whether they're true or not. The line of thought Matthew articulates here (i.e., we can solve millennium problems thus "optimism [related to encryption] is a very opinionated bet") may be defensible from a risk management perspective, but it is absolutely not defensible as a statement of knowledge. Internally that's fine, but the public (including the technical public) is not going to make that distinction. They will interpret it as knowledge. That does not help us.

[1]: https://x.com/matthew_d_green/status/2108281944291393983

at least he agrees that "he can't see the future"

there is just as much evidence for the opposite stance: AI can help us improve and formally verify every security reduction we use. As long as math allows some kind of trapdoor function, AI can help us produce the best crypto we can achieve from it.

Way more likely is that every existing cryptocurrency implementation contains bugs outside of the core cryptographic algorithm that would allow stealing coins without having to break that encryption. Cybersecurity is an arms race, as it always has been.

But this is a great example on why appealing to authority is a mistake and how academia is full of charlatans.

Only way I see that happening is if (big f... if) P = NP and some superintelligence devises a general algorithm to solve one on the other; but he's obviously not referring to that, as the timeline in that context is the next 1-5 years, i.e. the models we have now.

The thread has no coherent argument or new evidence at all but this simple truth must be drilled into the heads of the mathematicians, and whoever is next on the chopping block. Stochastic parrot with high gF will emerge one way or another, and you will like it.

> folks, Matt Green is not predicting that public key crypto will be cracked, he's predicting it will be regulated out of existence because LE will have no means to break into systems once we fix all the bugs https://bsky.app/profile/ver.ooo/post/3mxfbhrmk2c2u

socializer has already shown up in comments to correct this, and has a good twitter link from an hour ago, clarifying the post was really about ai math attacks possibly damaging some of the rare couple of cryptoanalysis attacks out there:

> These problems (right now basically MLWE and ECDLP with LWE and syndrome decoding as backups) have been extensively analyzed by humans. We felt good that the best known attacks were the best attacks. But we’re learning that human mathematical analysis isn’t the gold standard.

----

thankfully i think it's unrelated what else has happened in the last 24hr:

> If you haven’t asked abliterated GLM 5.3 to hack the Internet’s core routers, then you’re a happier person than I am right now. https://bsky.app/profile/matthewdgreen.bsky.social/post/3mxd...

and then oh look, a couple hours latter:

Critical Cisco Nexus Flaws Let Unauthenticated Attackers Execute Code With Root Privileges https://cybersecuritynews.com/critical-cisco-nexus-flaws/