Zaemis

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...