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.
Amazon will become worthless.
Half of the Internet is run by AWS, Amazon Web Services. Even if the retail front entirely died, Amazon would still survive for decades at minimum, if not centuries.
That is true. AWS is the most profitable part anyway. I meant the digital storefront more than the company. But even AWS would take a hit because the companies that host with them wouldn’t be able to sell either.
What does AI have to do with any of this. Secure is secure, insecure is insecure, AI won’t change what is or isn’t secure.
At most it would mean some things like some easy payment methods would be ended and it would be more 2fa and secure methods. The type of thing that is vulnerable is simple trust based things like calling for ordering food and appointments and stuff that can be done without payment before. That can be spammed.
The whole idea of AI is to be smarter than a person. Secure from a human doesn’t mean secure from an AI.
AI can’t be smart enough to break math.
No amount of AI processing can draw a triangle whose angles add up to more than 180°, factor a prime number into integer factors, find the square root of a negative number without using imaginary numbers, etc.
If the protocol and the cryptography is secure, no amount of smarts can overcome that security. If something is insecure, someone will probably figure it out (with or without the help of computers and AI) and take advantage of it until it’s patched.
Any cryptography can be broken with enough computing power and time, but that is beside the point. You don’t have to pick the lock if you can just climb through an open window. You get what I am saying?
There are loads of other ways to get credentials besides cracking encryption. Hell, wifi signals can be used to read the motions of a person’s hands over a keyboard with 90% accuracy. https://www.securityweek.com/researchers-use-wifi-signals-read-keystrokes/
Any cryptography can be broken with enough computing power and time,
This is wrong. A one-time pad is provably secure against an adversary with infinite time and infinite computing power.
And there isn’t infinite time or computing power. The math means you can use keys that can’t be cracked before the heat death of the universe, using even as many transistors as there are atoms on earth.
There will always be vulnerabilities and patches. I wouldn’t count on them actually breaking trust forever. And AI doesn’t have anything to do with that general statement.
Even one time pads can (and have been) broken because the keys used to encrypt them were not truly random.
https://medium.com/@allyson.english/perfect-secrecy-the-one-time-pad-4ce82b0b1a64
You are right about the heat death of the universe thing. The thing is processing power is always growing. Encryption algorithms have a lifespan. 40 and 56 bit encryption keys are obsolete as they are now easily broken. 128, 192, and 256 are the standard now. 512 bit encryption is being played around with. Throw in developments in quantum computing and who knows what will be secure in coming decades.
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.
40 and 56 bit encryption keys are obsolete as they are now easily broken. 128, 192, and 256 are the standard now. 512 bit encryption is being played around with.
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.
Throw in developments in quantum computing
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.
That would require them to train AI on something smarter than humans. Until that happens, the output of generative AI will only be faster than humans, not smarter.
checks…LOL… “I promise I have money”.
Even back like 15 years ago the systems at the chain grocery stores would read the info on the checks and query the banks to verify funds were available to cover the charge.
The same system would also print all the info on the check, ask for the person to sign it and then scan it in. Some systems would even put a copy on the receipt.
Since checks are so rarely used now, I’ve got no idea if that tech got cheaper or more prevalent, but, it’s not really that different than a card in terms of ease of use or holding up the line as long as the person doesn’t insist on filling out the check themselves.
It’s actually hilarious, my electric company wants to charge me a 3% fee for credit or debit. Instead, my bank just mails them a check through their bill pay system (no fee). It’s crazy that something being physically printed and mailed is the cheaper way to go, but here we are.
SIM cards/personal payments are pretty secure. Several generations more so than internal banking systems.
I was just reading a report on this and tracking down a credit card thief when they can only spend that money when it pings their location is… pretty decent.
The mistake is thinking that security comes from some kind of techno wizardry instead of the ability to unceremoniously kill the thief the very second the value of what they’ve stolen exceeds the cost of killing them.
That raises the interesting question of how effective could an AI be if it was specifically trained to cover your digital footprint.
Really horribly ineffective. It only has to make one mistake, it will fail miserably on day one no matter how much training it got.
Checks are part of the digital system as are banks.
They are now, but they existed for hundreds of years.
yes. hundreds of years ago staying of digital was no sweat.
We already have a system subject to impersonation attacks and simple fraud. Major retailers and fiscal institutions both spend a considerable amount of time tracking fraud, and often catch it so easily that they need to wait until it accumulates to a point where it’s worth reporting.
And, even if we were suddenly inundated with a level of fraud attempts sufficient to overwhelm the system, there is literally an entirely separate model of online finance that was designed to be zero trust.
And if “how existing banking” and “cryptocurrency” don’t convince you we won’t be reverting to cash, please realize that an AI ubiquitous to overwhelm global finance is also so ubiquitous that we might as well do what humans always actually do when commerce breaks down, and revert.to a gift economy.
Credit cards are a trillion dollar industry. Fraud is already a massive issue and it’s only grew. More and more places are going cashless for easier accounting and lower incidence of local theft. I highly doubt it’s going anywhere. It will become more of a hassle for consumers though - no doubt.
But how did you get from AI to credit card fraud?
How do you think AI will do that?
They might’ve read the recent openAI agents hacking things and made the conclusion that soon people will be able to use AI to hack most systems and steal credit card info.
Just my guess.
Do you mean people would use AI to crack financial institutions or that AI becomes sentient and does it itself?
Both really. I don’t think it’s too far of a logical jump to think that an AI programmed to maximize profits would decide theft is the easiest method.
Edit: the AI wouldn’t have to be sentient, just amoral.
An AI programmed to maximize profits with no restrictions coded to stop illegal activities would still be an example of someone using AI. Regardless, if you believe AI will be powerful enough to shut down financial institutions as an industry, why would you not also believe AI is just as powerful at defending against attacks. At the very least, finding the perpetrator before they get much of a chance to use their stolen money?
I havent heard of any AI research effort similar to the Navier-Stokes breakthrough to break elliptical curve cryptography but wouldn’t be surprised if such a thing happened. I mean, I’m sure I’d be surprised as the global banking system collapsed many times but a research effort like that seems reasonable to assume would be desirable by some state or private actor.
I think about the way AI solves problems. There have been several times they have been given a test and the AI determined the easiest way to pass the test was to break containment and steal the answer key. How would this apply if AI is given the goal of maximizing profits?
AI wouldn’t necessarily have to break the cryptography. The weakest point to any security system is the human. I have to imagine it would be easier for an AI to send mass phishing emails, break into digital wallets on phones, or steal saved credentials from various browsers. The AI doesn’t have to crack the whole system to make people lose faith in the security of online purchases.
