Gurgen Arakelov retweeted
Elliptic curves are not generic. Long time coming. Congrats @crypto_theory and collaborators github.com/bochum-crypto/sub… What I said a week ago: It wouldn't surprise me in the least bit if there were a better factoring or discrete logarithm alg. For factoring: what is the chance that exp(n^1/3) is the right bound? who are we kidding? For discrete log over finite fields: better algorithms over Z_p have followed a decade or so behind those for small-char fields (Coppersmith'84 vs NFS a decade-ish later). Joux gave a quasi-poly alg over small-char fields in the 2010s. Porting to finite fields long overdue. For discrete log over elliptic curves: assuming that elliptic curve groups were "generic" is particularly preposterous given the rich structure they have. All of these ripe for disruption. Unstructured LPN would take me by real surprise, also unstructured LWE to a slightly lesser extent.
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P = NP would not necessarily break the cryptography we use today in practice. P ≠ NP would not guarantee that it is secure. Neither statement alone settles the practical security of modern cryptography.
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I’d bet that P = NP.
When do you think P vs NP problem will be solved? this month or next or later?
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Railway reported that attackers may have accessed encrypted customer data and potentially its decrypted contents. A reminder that encryption ≠ security. AI doesn't need to break cryptography to break cryptographic systems. I wrote more about why: fherma.io/blog/ai-doesnt-nee…
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"As AI accelerates discoveries, we face a new bottleneck: understanding what matters and adapting existing systems."
Impressive result from Anthropic, well beyond cryptography. Claude reportedly took less than 30 minutes to trace the origins of NIST elliptic curve seeds, a question open for over 25 years. No vulnerability found, but the implications for research are significant. As AI accelerates discoveries, we face a new bottleneck: understanding what matters and adapting existing systems. monstream.io/f/claude-recons…
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Hey @grok, Trump says he agreed with Putin on major Russian diesel supplies to the US and global market. Where do you think Russia will spend the money it earns from those sales?
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I created a new AI vs Cryptography stream on Monstream to track developments around how advances in AI and automated mathematics may affect cryptographic security, including work on elliptic curves, lattices, PQC, FHE, and related areas. You can follow it here: monstream.io/s/6ac74366498f7…
I don't recommend anyone scramble to move their funds to new wallets today. But we should take the risks to cryptography from AI-accelerated math seriously, and minimize our exposure to not just quantum-vulnerable cryptography, but also potentially AI-vulnerable cryptography. The core new area of risk from this viewpoint is, unfortunately, ML-DSA / FHE / lattices. (and it's also another reason, along with quantum, why ECDSA might fall even faster than expected, hence the "fresh address" recommendation) So far most people have been in the mode of thinking "elliptic curves broken, hashes safe, lattices safe". But there is a good chance that the concrete security of lattices will take serious hits from the next two years of AI math. The basic threat model is: factoring is something that naively takes 2^(n/2) time, but over decades smart people have found and optimized number field sieves, and degraded that to 2^O(n^(1/3)), which is why RSA keys and signatures need to be ~400 bytes (and not 64 bytes). What if there are skeletons in the closet like that, both for elliptic curves and lattices, that we are simply not smart enough to discover - but bots soon will be? This is a major part of the reason why for the past year ethereum's lean roadmap has been going in the "hash-only" direction: no lattices, no ML-DSA, no Falcon, no lattice-based commitments inside ZK proofs, etc. Signatures in lean ethereum are all hash-based, either WOTS or SPHINCS-. For signatures and proofs, we already know how to go hash-only. The bigger challenge is for *public-key encryption* - and this goes far beyond blockchains. Secure communication, anonymizing protocols, lots of things need public-key encryption. And unfortunately there are long-standing mathematical theorems showing why public-key encryption cannot be done with hashes alone. You have to have some kind of trapdoor object that has at least one form of usable "structure" - either group theory (incl. isogenies) or lattices or code-based or potentially in the future even more newfangled and spooky things (local mixing?). But for anything that has structure, you should assume that AI will make at least some progress in breaking that structure. Here, one reasonable inference is that if you want to make something plausibly long-term secure, multiply the key sizes by 10. To me that's a very plausible world and something not at all extreme to predict. If AI will bring us 50 years of math in 2 years, then that 50 years of math may very plausibly include a "naive factoring -> GNFS" level of improvement to our ability to break lattices. In that world, lattices will still exist, but they will have to be significantly bigger to guarantee the same level of safety. And at those new larger sizes, hash-based constructions will beat lattice-based constructions on concrete efficiency in every use case where hash-based constructions are possible at all. Theoretically, of course it's possible that hashes are broken too (eg. P = NP would imply that). But I think P = NP is very unlikely. And intuitively, it's much more likely that a mathematical object has exactly no exploitable structure (like hashes are intended to), than that a mathematical object has exactly ~3 forms of exploitable structure (for elliptic curves: associativity, Schoof, pairings) and not some secret fourth form of structure we have not yet discovered that greatly degrades its security (for elliptic curves, ECDLP and pairing security). Similar for LWE, SVP, RLWE and the zoo of lattice problems. For this reason, we do not yet see any reason to worry and start padding the byte size of hashes (if we start to worry more, we would pad the round count first before doing anything to the byte size). Concrete TLDR, my own personal views: * Hash-based > lattice-based, in those situations where hash-based is possible at all * For anything lattice-based, be much more paranoid on param sizes. Remember that blockchains are only a small portion of the cryptography story; this point goes far beyond blockchains and applies to eg. access to websites, secure messaging, Tor / VPNs ... * For privacy protocols, strongly favor NOT putting encrypted notes onchain. Instead, send them offchain through some third-party mechanism. * If it's not difficult for you, keeping your funds in addresses which have not yet been used to make a transaction is a good idea. If it's easy for you, do it. **But be careful about migrations; I personally have lost more money in botched migrations than I have lost in all hacks combined**. * For multisig wallets, doing confirmations offchain is better than onchain, because this way the signatures of signer wallets do not get exposed to the public, so if ECDSA falls to AI much faster than expected, at least the multisig "gracefully degrades" to a 1-of-1 where the 1 is whoever was gathering the signatures - a much better place to be than "anyone can take the money" firefly.social/post/x/210783…
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Launched a new FHE stream on Monstream. It tracks relevant developments across the field: new implementations and releases, research updates, attacks and security findings, benchmarks, events, talks, and other technical developments. You can follow it here and receive the updates automatically: monstream.io/s/6ac5df53b2b48…
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Gurgen Arakelov retweeted
NVIDIA × Fair Math Challenges are LIVE on FHERMA! We're excited to collaborate with @NVIDIAHPCDev to bring GPU acceleration layer support to the FHE ecosystem using NVIDIA's cuPQC. To kickstart this initiative, we're launching two new developer challenges with GPU compute: - Polynomial Multiplication: Build high-performance polynomial multiplication on cuPQC's bigint backend.  (Great entry point for GPU/CUDA devs!) - Key Switching in CKKS: Optimize one of FHE's biggest bottlenecks using GPU-native arithmetic. Whether you're an FHE researcher or a CUDA/GPU dev, you can help build open-source infrastructure that projects worldwide will use. Join the challenges: fherma.io #FHE #Cryptography #CUDA #GPU #cuPQC #NVIDIA #OpenSource
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When do you think P vs NP problem will be solved? this month or next or later?
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Last week, we introduced the new FHERMA and our vision for the future of privacy-preserving computation. As AI makes implementations cheaper to create and specialize, the bottleneck shifts from building them to finding, evaluating, and integrating the best ones. FHERMA is the infrastructure layer for that shift. More ↓ fherma.io/blog/the-new-fherm…
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Gurgen Arakelov retweeted
1/8 Today, we’re introducing a completely new FHERMA. What started as a challenge and benchmarking platform for FHE is evolving into a much bigger infrastructure layer: a common system for discovering, evaluating and using the state-of-the-art building blocks/components behind modern privacy technologies and the applications built on top of them.
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Yesterday, several media reported that @binance provided Russian law enforcement with information specifically identifying users who had donated to organizations designated as “undesirable” by the Russian authorities. As a result, people who made those donations, including many who may still be in Russia or nearby, could now face criminal prosecution and potentially 10+ years in prison. At the same time, @binance has formally stoped business in Russia and presents itself as compliant with international sanctions. The absurdity of this situation is difficult to overstate. And it demonstrates why we need end-to-end encrypted transfers and privacy-preserving financial infrastructure. This isn't about someone seeing what you bought or knowing how much money you have. It's about the fact that a payment made through an intermediary can later become evidence against you, because the intermediary retains the ability to connect your identity to that transaction and disclose it to a government. For tens of thousands of people, financial privacy isn't an ideological debate or a nice-to-have feature. It can be the difference between freedom and a prison sentence.
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More exciting updates coming soon.
Happy to share our collaboration with @nvidia and @DualityTech research teams: "Efficient Large-Integer Arithmetic for FHE". Efficient large-integer arithmetic is a key building block of modern fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). In this paper, we discuss the algorithms and implementation techniques behind high-performance arithmetic for vectorized FHE schemes, examine the trade-offs between different approaches, and highlight promising directions for future improvements. It was a pleasure collaborating with researchers from NVIDIA and Duality Technologies on this work.
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Gurgen Arakelov retweeted
We are investing! Let me know if you want our agent to review your project and send feedback. As @eldar_pm called it internally - it’s our abusive intelligence so get prepared in advance. Voila now you know. Share with whoever needs to see this. Bisous
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I think we should consider this as an official acknowledgment that these are the best models on the market, while the decision to restrict their use strategically is one of the worst.
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…
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Post-quantum cryptography prepares us for more powerful computation. Nowadays we need post-AI protocols to prepare for more powerful intelligence.
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Gurgen Arakelov retweeted
Also appreciate the approach to manually screen who's listed as an investor
We've seen more than 500 attempts to register as investors on Parley. A quick reminder: every investor on Parley is manually verified by our team. We don't and won't approve scouts, "connectors", people who are "about to launch a fund", or anyone whose status as an active investor we can't independently verify. Today, there are more than 40 investors on Parley and e've spoken with every single one of them personally and can stand behind who they are. If an investor is on Parley, it's because we've verified that they're a real investor, fund, or family office actively deploying capital. If your application takes time to review or gets declined, please don't take it personally. We're intentionally keeping the investor side of Parley highly curated to protect founders.
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Gurgen Arakelov retweeted
Attesting to this. Im grinding solo to get connects to investors, confident I can lay out the value prop for what I'm building within a 15' call. The tough part is getting on that call. Parley got me there within 48hrs 🤯 >50% response rate is nuts, any founder doing cold outreach will find it hard to believe this number is true but at least in my case that's where I stand at the moment! What's great is that it's actually +EV for Investors & funds as well. It would save them tons of time of manual screening, and basically allow them to find the gems in a haystack of cold outreach overflow they're probably facing today. Thanks @g_arakelov , great tool with undeniable value 🤝
Great to see founders getting value from Parley
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