Kawoomba comments on How does MIRI Know it Has a Medium Probability of Success? - Less Wrong

19 Post author: peter_hurford 01 August 2013 11:42AM

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Comment author: Kawoomba 03 August 2013 09:20:34PM 0 points [-]

if P=NP then no [provably] secure encryption scheme can exist.

What? Why? Just because RSA would be broken? Shor's algorithm would also do so, even in a proven P!=NP world. There may be other substitutes for RSA, using different complexity classes. There are other approaches altogether. Not to mention one-time pads.

Comment author: gwern 03 August 2013 10:32:09PM 3 points [-]

As I understand it, if P=NP in a practical sense, then almost all cryptography is destroyed as P=NP destroys one-way functions & secure hashes in general. So RSA goes down, many quantum-proof systems go down, and so on and so forth, and you're left with basically just http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_security

http://www.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~krajicek/ri5svetu.pdf discusses some of this.

Not to mention one-time pads.

And life was so happy with just one-time pads?

Comment author: Kawoomba 03 August 2013 11:35:42PM 1 point [-]

Really, if P=NP, then encoding your messages would be quite low on the priority list ... however we're not debating the practical impact here, but that "finding a provably secure encryption scheme is harder than proving P!=NP", which was raised as a nitpick, and is clearly not the case.

Happiness or unhappiness of life with one-time pads notwithstanding.