JP Aumasson on Quantum Risk, AI Attacks and Too Much Crypto

This week, Anna, Tarun and Nico are joined by JP Aumasson, co-designer of BLAKE3, author of Serious Cryptography and cryptography engineer at Cloudflare. They revisit the quantum threat to cryptography, looking at recent advances in quantum attacks on RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography, and discuss why JP remains cautious about predictions of an imminent “Q-day.” They then explore how AI is changing cryptanalysis, from recent RSA factoring records to the growing divide between symmetric and asymmetric cryptography. The conversation then turns to Poseidon and recent attacks that have challenged confidence in ZK-friendly hash functions, as well as China’s new NGCC competition, where AI is already being used to find weaknesses in candidate designs. JP shares his experiments using AI for cryptanalysis, why it could accelerate both the building and breaking of cryptographic systems, and a introduces a project exploring AI-driven attacks on hash functions.   Related Links  

• Too Much Crypto by Jean-Philippe Aumasson
• Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies against Quantum Vulnerabilities: Resource Estimates and Mitigations
• Flock: Fast Proving for Batch Boolean Computations
• Flock Challenge
• POSEIDON: A New Hash Function for Zero-Knowledge Proof Systems (Updated Version)
• Ngcc.dev
• Chinese NGCC Algorithms: The First Week of AI Cryptanalysis
• JP Aumasson Papers
• Yukon.org
• ZK Podcast Episode: The Quantum Question Panel – Live from zkSummit14!
• ZK Podcast Episode: Quantum Advances, Hybrid Signatures and SNARKs to the Rescue with Dan Boneh

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