The gang talks about what AI getting Good At Math might mean for cryptography, and why public-key cryptography probably isn’t ending. David is on a mission to civilize and claims a crisis of empiricism. He also wrote a blog post about this. Everyone agrees Nadia deserves tokens.

“I mean, you could claim that anything's real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody's proved it doesn't exist!”

Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2026/10/27/everybody-is-losing-their-minds-about-ai-math-and-crypto/

Chapters:

00:00 intro
05:19 rumors swirl
12:37 math etiquette
17:11 magical math machines
21:42 diffie-hellman
29:50 finite field
34:45 david aware
42:36 complexity theory
48:40 full disclosure

Links:

- David’s Blog: https://dadrian.io/blog/posts/everybody-is-losing-their-minds/
- Similar opinions from virgi: https://people.csail.mit.edu/virgi/thoughts.txt
- The OpenAI Math Drop: https://github.com/openai/math
- Scientific American on the OpenAI math drop: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openai-unleashes-hundreds-more-math-results-upon-a-field-already-in-shock/
- Derek Thompson on AI’s impact on math: https://www.derekthompson.org/p/i-know-why-the-mathematicians-weep
- Sophie Schmieg’s blog connecting elliptic curves and finite field DH: https://keymaterial.net/2025/05/23/there-is-no-diffie-hellman-but-elliptic-curve-diffie-hellman/
- Friend of the show Steve Weiss factored RSA-896 with spare Anthropic capacity: https://saweis.net/posts/rsa-896.html
- Alex Clemmer’s tweet about the shortcomings of complexity theory: https://x.com/hausdorff_space/status/2107916908616175701
- Ben Recht (Berkeley ECE) on the FFT improvements showing how complexity theory can be disconnected from real computers:: https://www.argmin.net/p/faster-fourier-transforms
- State of the art number field sieve implementation (CADO-NFS): https://cado-nfs.gitlabpages.inria.fr/
- Why 128-bits of symmetric security is enough for quantum resistance: https://words.filippo.io/128-bits/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadia_Heninger
- https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~nadiah/
- Matt Green’s Tokens to Humans estimator: https://bitsofwork.org/

"Security Cryptography Whatever" is hosted by Deirdre Connolly (@durumcrustulum), Thomas Ptacek (@tqbf), and David Adrian (@dadrian)

The robots are at it again, and this time they’re solving, and breaking(?), math and cryptography! Things have been happening in the lattice corner including new leapfrogging complexity results in the closest vector problem (CVP), AND a possible poly-time quantum attack against the dihedral coset problem (DCP) that made everyone freak out for about a week (UPDATE: looks like it’s busted: https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/1693). ALSO, there was an important distinguisher attack against Classic McEliece, which on its face doesn’t sound like a big deal, unless you’re familiar with the track record of efficient distinguishers in the history of code-based cryptography… 😱

To help us make sense of all this we are joined again by OG friend of the pod Chris Peikert! We had trouble with his audio but tried our best to fix it, apologies.

Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2026/08/26/ai-lattice-proofs-with-chris-peikert/

Links:
- https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/
- https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/ten-proofs-oai.pdf
- https://x.com/ChrisPeikert/status/2083534770403750025
- https://bsky.app/profile/chrispeikert.bsky.social/post/3msp3boueis2z
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_satisfiability_problem
- https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wordcel-shape-rotator-mathcel
- Chen 2024: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/555
- https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/1630
- https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/1693
- CVP within n^(1/2-ɛ) - : https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/1655

"Security Cryptography Whatever" is hosted by Deirdre Connolly (@durumcrustulum), Thomas Ptacek (@tqbf), and David Adrian (@dadrian)

We invited Mark Schultz-Wu on the podcast to talk about the history of lattice cryptography. When lattices are explained in plain english, they are actually quite simple! I don't think any of us have ever seen Deirdre so happy. If you're watching the video version, there's a section that's 6.1 minutes long with no cuts and consists just of Deirdre vigorously agreeing with what Mark is saying while smiling. What a time to be alive.

Anyway, we are hosting another happy hour in Vegas between Black Hat and DEF CON! It's sponsored by Teleport! Thank you to Teleport, and dear readers, you should go check them out. Check out our socials or the podcast site to register.

Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2026/07/27/lattices-with-mark-schultz-wu/

Links:

• Mark's IETF Post https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tls/HznE1IcCjstEjhh4M1p59qX1JlQ/
• NTRU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTRU
• The original lattices are hard paper https://www.scirp.org/reference/referencespapers?referenceid=3401227
• The original LWE for cryptography paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03703
• Entropic LWE https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/119
• Dilithium round 3 submission: https://pq-crystals.org/dilithium/data/dilithium-specification-round3.pdf
• Recent attacks on Classic McEliece: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1694
• Lectures on post-quantum cryptography from Alfred Menezes (an originator of elliptic curve cryptography) https://www.youtube.com/@cryptography101-alfred
• Falcon https://csrc.nist.gov/csrc/media/Presentations/2024/falcon/images-media/prest-falcon-pqc2024.pdf
• Regev: https://cims.nyu.edu/~regev/#research
• Tightness in Proofs: https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/360.pdf
  
  
  
  

"Security Cryptography Whatever" is hosted by Deirdre Connolly (@durumcrustulum), Thomas Ptacek (@tqbf), and David Adrian (@dadrian)