Vitalik Buterin backs crypto ‘bunker mode’ as AI math puts wallet security on notice

Ethereum researcher Justin Drake on Wednesday urged the crypto industry to prepare for “bunker mode,” warning that artificial intelligence could eventually break the cryptography that secures crypto wallets before quantum computers do, Cointelegraph reports. His recommendation is a slow, controlled move of funds to fresh wallet addresses. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin backed the warning the same day: “I don’t recommend anyone scramble to move their funds to new wallets today. But we should take the risks to cryptography from AI-accelerated math seriously.”

The trigger was OpenAI’s release on Tuesday of hundreds of results on long-open math problems, produced by an internal model that hasn’t been released. Drake said the release showed how fast AI math is moving. “Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen,” he wrote.

Most crypto wallets are protected by an elliptic-curve signature scheme called ECDSA. A wallet has a private key that signs transactions and a public key that anyone can use to check the signature. The system is safe only as long as nobody can work backward from the public key to the private one. Nobody has proved that is impossible. It’s an assumption that has held because no one has found a fast way to do it.

Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at the crypto investment firm Dragonfly, put it bluntly on X: “The risk is not quantum, but just conventional mathematics overturning unproven cryptographic hardness assumptions.” Drake argued that elliptic curves are especially exposed because they “carry rich structure,” the kind of algebra a strong mathematician, human or machine, can look for shortcuts in. Hash functions, which scramble data one way, are designed to have as little of that structure as possible.

That’s why the fix is to move coins to addresses that have never signed a transaction. A wallet’s public key goes public the first time it sends. An address that has only ever received funds hasn’t exposed it yet, so even a future break of the curve math gives an attacker no public key to start from.

Buterin then went a step past Drake. Lattice-based cryptography is the family most of the industry has treated as the safe destination, the math meant to survive quantum computers. “So far most people have been in the mode of thinking ‘elliptic curves broken, hashes safe, lattices safe,'” he wrote. “But there is a good chance that the concrete security of lattices will take serious hits from the next two years of AI math.” He said that’s a major reason Ethereum’s long-term roadmap has been heading toward a “hash-only” design.

Crypto has spent years planning around one threat, quantum computing, and that threat is hardware. Progress shows up as bigger machines that people can count and argue about, which gives the industry a rough clock. A math break would show up as a paper. If Buterin is right about lattices, the migration plan built for the quantum threat could be pointed at a destination that AI math weakens first, and the safer plan assumes a threat with no clock.

The migration carries its own risk, which is why neither researcher wants a stampede. “I personally have lost more money in botched migrations than I have lost in all hacks combined,” Buterin wrote. Drake said “a rushed migration would do more harm than good,” and that large, sophisticated holders should go first.

The labs are looking at the same question. Cryptography was conspicuously missing from OpenAI’s release, the theoretical computer scientist Scott Aaronson noted in an update to his blog post on the results, and his sources tell him AI companies have started, “gingerly and discreetly,” testing whether their newest internal models can break important cryptographic protocols. In the same post, he wrote that the model behind the math results might reach paying ChatGPT customers within the next couple of months, depending on the recommendations of OpenAI’s safety board.

Sources

• Cointelegraph: Vitalik Buterin backs crypto ‘bunker mode’ amid rapid AI math advances
• Shtetl-Optimized (Scott Aaronson): The Mathocalypse