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.
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?
It’s about the volume and the public’s faith in the system. If you’re getting stolen from once a month, you’re going to start questioning if the convenience of online shopping is worth it.