If rising geopolitical tensions weren’t enough cause for concern, now it’s crypto’s turn to go nuclear.
The industry is busy debating a cryptography doomsday scenario in which attackers derive private keys from public keys using a formerly far-fetched, but now potentially credible, AI scenario that places everyone’s crypto at risk.
Ethereum researcher Justin Drake called for “bunker mode” planning last Wednesday, citing “humbling” advances in artificial intelligence that could accelerate the discovery of mathematical attacks and ultimately “break” cryptography:
“IMO it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA [Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm] breaks before Qday, in the worst case in months not years.”
Drake thinks the industry should begin planning a controlled migration of assets to fresh addresses whose public keys have not been exposed, reducing the information a potential attacker could exploit.
But what is he basing this warning on, and is there genuine cause for alarm?
Is the crypto panic justified?
Drake’s concern is not just whether AI will speed up the arrival of quantum computers able to break cryptography, but that AI systems might also help discover mathematical attacks using classical computing that human cryptographers have missed.
He argues that elliptic curves — the cryptography that underpins most blockchains — may be more vulnerable to such breakthroughs than hash functions because of their greater mathematical structure, which raises the possibility of a classical algorithm breaking elliptic curve cryptography.
Justin Drake wants the industry to plan for bunker mode. Source: Justin Drake
Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, weighed in on Drake’s assessment, adding fuel to the flames of panic already ripping through the crypto industry.
“I think we might lose public key cryptography,” he said.
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Not everyone shares their alarm. Coinbase’s head of cryptography, Yehuda Lindell, said that, to his knowledge, there is “no evidence whatsoever” that the decades-old mathematical assumptions underpinning elliptic curve cryptography have been weakened.
Lucien Bourdon, Bitcoin analyst at hardware wallet Trezor, tells Magazine:
“There are no credible published advances against the math behind ECDSA, with AI or anything else.”
He says that none of OpenAI’s recent releases of AI-written math papers contain an attack on ECDSA — although Drake believes that’s cause for suspicion rather than comfort. Drake’s other argument is that elliptic curves have more mathematical structure than hash functions, which could make them easier to break.
“He doesn’t say how,” Bourdon says. “He also calls his timeline a worst-case scenario and tells people not to rush.”
Zach Herbert, chief executive and cofounder of hardware wallet FoundationHQ, tells Magazine 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.
In that case, “they already have the information needed to derive the public keys you’re trying to hide,” he says.
And as Taylor Monahan, founder and chief executive of Ethereum wallet MetaMask, pointed out, if cryptography breaks, the price of your bags won’t be your only concern:
“If elliptic curves are broken so that any exposed public key leads to compromise and it’s by a financially-motivated hacker whose top priority is to steal crypto, the entire fu**ing world is going to zero. Having your magic internet coins in bunker mode is not going to help you.”
Why moving coins may not be enough
Herbert says xpubs let wallets generate multiple public keys for the same account, including those for addresses that have never been used.
If a wallet app or third party already has that information, moving funds to a fresh address within the same account may not hide the new address’s public key from them.
If ECDSA became practically breakable, “an attacker could recover the corresponding private keys without ever touching your hardware wallet.”
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“No, it’s obviously not sufficient protection,” Eli Ben-Sasson, co-founder and chief executive of Ethereum scaling protocol StarkWare, tells Magazine.
“Other than just moving your coins, if you want to use them ever again, you would need to download new kinds of wallets.”
He says a break would affect more than wallet signatures, too. Ethereum’s infrastructure-level signatures and consensus mechanisms would also need attention, as would the Kate-Zaverucha-Goldberg (KZG) polynomial commitment scheme used for data in blobs.
“Finally, gas prices would likely also increase dramatically, because a lot of the functionality would break,” he adds.
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