We’re told that it will take powerful quantum computers to break RSA encryption, so for now the world is safe. But I wondered, in an era of increasingly sophisticated models, might AI pose a threat? These systems excel at finding patterns in data that humans miss, and if there were any subtle weaknesses in key generation, I would think AI could detect them. Yes, theory says it’s all but impossible to break RSA because it relies on the computational hardness of factoring large prime numbers. But theory and practice don’t always align, and sometimes the most interesting discoveries come from testing our assumptions. So I set up an experiment to test whether a transformer model could learn to reverse-engineer SSH private keys from their corresponding public keys. Experiment and Results I trained a T5-small transformer model (60 million parameters) on a dataset of 50,000 SSH key pairs, split into 70% training, 15% validation, and 15% test. Given a public key as input, the model was as...
As I write more and more Esperanto fiction, I find myself referencing the currency spesmiloj in an attempt to create an immersive Esperanto environment for the reader. Here's an example from my mikronovelo La Kristala Ananso : “Kun aroga certeco, juna entreprenisto proponis unu milionon da spesmiloj. Neniu aŭdacis proponi pli.” The narrative doesn’t change whether it’s a million USD, a million CAD, or a million EUR... so why not a million spesmiloj? I’m certain most of my readers aren’t millionaires, so the exact amount really doesn’t mean much beyond “a lot of money.” But then I wondered: how much is a million spesmiloj, really? According to Wikipedia , the spesmilo was "equivalent to one thousand spesoj, and worth 0.733 grams (0.0259 oz) of pure gold (0.8 grams of 22 karat gold).” So 0.733 g × 1,000,000 = 733,000 g At the current spot price for gold per gram of 107.75 USD / 92.87 EUR, we get: 733,000 g × 107.75 USD = 78,980,750 USD 733,000 g × 92.87 EUR = 68...