The recently reported OpenAI mathematical breakthrough has sparked a double security threat among cryptography experts and blockchain researchers alike.
OpenAI claimed it solved a century-old mathematical problem. For blockchain researchers, this meant the current cryptography underpinning blockchain security could be cracked sooner than anticipated.
The industry has long viewed quantum computers as the real threat, but this is still years away. But it has to deal with AI advancement now.
Unsurprisingly, experts and the community are divided on how to react to the immediate AI advancement.
Is ‘bunker mode’ enough for crypto security?
Currently, whenever one spends their crypto, the public key becomes public and is tied to individual transfers or the wallet. With a powerful AI model or quantum computer, these can be reverse-engineered to generate a private key to crack and steal the funds.
In fact, there is already speculation that there could be ongoing harvesting of public keys by threat actors as they wait for functional quantum computers or advanced AI models.
Now that the latter can arrive early, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake suggested,
I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for ‘bunker mode.’ My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses, i.e. addresses whose pubkeys remain hidden behind a hash.
According to Drake, OpenAI underrepresented breakthroughs in cryptography results in its latest report, likely due to government censorship.
In other words, he believes OpenAI’s latest models can crack the current blockchain cryptography (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm, ECDSA). Hence, the urgency for the ‘bunker mode’ call or hiding public keys in hashes.
Still, some think it could take a while for AI models to be able to crack cryptography. Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at VC Dragonfly, noted,
Doomerism has now hit cryptography. The risk is not quantum, but just conventional mathematics overturning unproven cryptographic hardness assumptions. It’s UTXO-mode for a while.
For his part, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin agreed with the call but advised against address migration. He warned that rushed migration could lead to loss of funds from misconfigured multi-sig setups, and AI will still get better at cracking alternatives too.
Buterin believes the AI advances could also help researchers create better and hardened cryptography algorithms.
What’s next for the crypto industry?
Still, there are those who have taken an extremely pessimistic view. Dankrad Feist, another Ethereum researcher, said if AI cracks blockchain, everything will be worthless.
If elliptic curves are broken, having them (crypto assets) in bunker mode is not going to help you. They are still worth zero.
Whether this will sour the current market sentiment (greed) and derail the expected crypto market bull run remains to be seen. But it could accelerate the post-quantum and post-AI era push in the industry.
Final Summary
- Experts are divided on whether ‘bunker mode’ is enough crypto security against AI threat.
- Vitalik Buterin warned against rushed address migration, warning of potential loss of fund.