‘Bunker’ mode: Vitalik Buterin takes seriously the risk that AI-accelerated maths could break wallet cryptography

Following OpenAI’s flurry of mathematical findings, Ethereum researchers fear that AI could undermine elliptic curves even before the advent of quantum computing, and Scott Aaronson claims that laboratories are already testing their models in this area.

Ethereum researcher Justin Drake on October 7 called on the crypto ecosystem to prepare for a "bunker mode": according to him, advances in AI in mathematics could one day make it possible to break the ECDSA signature algorithm that protects wallets. He suggests a gradual migration of funds to new addresses whose public key has never been exposed. Vitalik Buterin supported the alert, while advising against moving funds in a hurry.

Euclidean networks also targeted

Buterin goes further than Drake: he believes that the concrete security of network-based cryptography, which is supposed to be quantum-resistant, could also suffer from the mathematical advances of AI within two years. This is one of the reasons why Ethereum's roadmap favors constructions based solely on hash functions, which are less rich in algebraic structure.

On the same day, computer theorist Scott Aaronson noted on his blog that cryptography was conspicuous by its absence from the list of results published by OpenAI, and claimed, with supporting sources, that AI companies have begun to quietly check whether their latest internal models can undermine important cryptographic protocols and primitives.