I think it will simply become impossible to keep digital payment systems secure. The whole online economy will collapse. Amazon will become worthless. People will actually have to go out to local stores to buy everything. People will have to go to their local bank or currency exchange to cash their paychecks. The credit card system will fail completely too, while payday loans will take their place. The stock market will have to go back to traders yelling their trades to each other at exchanges. The old ways will become new.
The whole idea of AI is to be smarter than a person. Secure from a human doesn’t mean secure from an AI.
That would require them to train AI on something smarter than humans. Until that happens, the output of generative AI will only be faster than humans, not smarter.
AI can’t be smart enough to break math.
No amount of AI processing can draw a triangle whose angles add up to more than 180°, factor a prime number into integer factors, find the square root of a negative number without using imaginary numbers, etc.
If the protocol and the cryptography is secure, no amount of smarts can overcome that security. If something is insecure, someone will probably figure it out (with or without the help of computers and AI) and take advantage of it until it’s patched.
Any cryptography can be broken with enough computing power and time, but that is beside the point. You don’t have to pick the lock if you can just climb through an open window. You get what I am saying?
There are loads of other ways to get credentials besides cracking encryption. Hell, wifi signals can be used to read the motions of a person’s hands over a keyboard with 90% accuracy. https://www.securityweek.com/researchers-use-wifi-signals-read-keystrokes/
This is wrong. A one-time pad is provably secure against an adversary with infinite time and infinite computing power.
And there isn’t infinite time or computing power. The math means you can use keys that can’t be cracked before the heat death of the universe, using even as many transistors as there are atoms on earth.
There will always be vulnerabilities and patches. I wouldn’t count on them actually breaking trust forever. And AI doesn’t have anything to do with that general statement.
Even one time pads can (and have been) broken because the keys used to encrypt them were not truly random.
https://medium.com/@allyson.english/perfect-secrecy-the-one-time-pad-4ce82b0b1a64
You are right about the heat death of the universe thing. The thing is processing power is always growing. Encryption algorithms have a lifespan. 40 and 56 bit encryption keys are obsolete as they are now easily broken. 128, 192, and 256 are the standard now. 512 bit encryption is being played around with. Throw in developments in quantum computing and who knows what will be secure in coming decades.
That SEO slop article is simply wrong on the math of cryptography, and relies on an example of the one time pad not being used only one time. Either way, the interesting thing about the OTP is that you cannot prove that any particular plaintext exists, so the nonsense about trying to infer any particular plaintext from the encrypted text. Frequency analysis doesn’t help when there is no correlation between different bits of the key, the same way that flipping a fair coin 10 times reveals nothing about what it will likely be on the 11th flip.
You might be tricked into believing that a 512 bit key is twice as hard to crack as a 256 bit key. No, a 257 bit key is twice as hard to crack, and a 512 but key is 2^256 (1.5 x 10^77 ) times harder to crack. So if you can crack a 256 bit key in 1 second, a 512 bit key would take 3,672,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to crack using that same technique. Or, if you can crack 1 million 256-bit keys in a second, go ahead and take 6 zeroes off the number I just listed.
Good luck with that. Quantum computers aren’t anywhere close, and more importantly, have nothing to do with AI.
AI isn’t going to make cryptography obsolete.
My argument was never that AI would make cryptography obsolete. My argument was that it would make digital payments obsolete. No matter how good your encryption, the weak link is the human. Somewhere along the line someone is going to have a password that is their favorite sports team followed by their anniversary. Someone will reuse the same password over and over including a site with exploitable security flaws. Someone will release a security update with a vulnerability to a zero day exploit. These are the things that AI are great at sitting there and waiting for.
None of this is new, and none of this has destroyed the feasibility of electronic payments. AI has nothing to do with any of it.
The ability to conduct fraud, hack websites, and hijack accounts has always been around. The systems we’ve built will always assume that occurs on a regular basis, and are resilient against needing to address this reality. How does any of this prevent electronic payments from being processed?