Crypto industry leaders are debating a cryptographic doomsday scenario where artificial intelligence could derive private keys from public keys, potentially putting all crypto assets at risk. Ethereum researcher Justin Drake warned of this possibility last Wednesday, suggesting that advances in AI could accelerate the discovery of mathematical attacks that might 'break' cryptography. Drake called for a 'bunker mode' approach, advising the industry to plan a controlled migration of assets to fresh addresses to reduce exposure to potential attackers.
Drake's concerns are not limited to AI speeding up the development of quantum computers capable of breaking cryptography. He also fears that AI systems might help uncover mathematical attacks using classical computing that human cryptographers have missed. Elliptic curves, which underpin most blockchains, may be more vulnerable to such breakthroughs than hash functions due to their greater mathematical structure. However, critics like Coinbase's head of cryptography, Yehuda Lindell, argue that there is no evidence to suggest that the mathematical assumptions underpinning elliptic curve cryptography have been weakened.
Some experts, like Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, share Drake's alarm, while others, like Lucien Bourdon of Trezor, dismiss the panic as unfounded. Bourdon points out that there are no credible published advances against the math behind the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), and none of OpenAI's recent releases of AI-written math papers contain an attack on ECDSA. Zach Herbert of FoundationHQ warns that moving funds to fresh addresses may not be enough if an extended public key (xpub) has already been shared with a wallet app or third party, as they already have the information needed to derive the public keys.
Ethereum's infrastructure-level signatures and consensus mechanisms would also need attention in the event of a cryptographic break. Eli Ben-Sasson of StarkWare suggests that users would need to download new kinds of wallets and that gas prices would likely increase dramatically. Some blockchains, like NEAR Protocol, are already preparing for cryptographic threats, while Ethereum is developing a broader post-quantum roadmap. Vitalik Buterin has outlined a potential hard fork that would roll back blocks following mass theft, disable conventional wallet transactions, and let users reclaim funds using zero-knowledge proofs of a seed phrase.