Hard Problems

All this new ai buzz has brought up another classic: the hard problems paradox. In cryptography, there is a need for problems that are easy to state and compute, but are hard to reverse engineer or solve efficiently without the key.

The interesting part is that no one knows if these "hard problems" actually exist! Complexity theory has not been able to prove that any problems exist that match those criteria; therefore the paradox that the entire field of securing your data is based on an improved theory!

If that theory is wrong, the entire security industry will collapse overnight. Certain new technology such as quantum computing already makes that theory rather dubious, and many headlines about how quantum computers just solved problems that would take a supercomputer billions of years are cryptography problems!

TLDR: nothing is safe, it's just a matter of how much someone wants something and what resources they have access to.

Source: https://www.quantamagazine.org/cryptographers-show-that-ai-protections-will-always-have-holes-20251210/