• [Signalgate] Scandal Details: In the recent [Signalgate] scandal, senior Trump administration appointees used the [Signal app] on their phones to discuss an attack on the Houthis. They discussed risks like phone compromise and human factors like adding a journalist by mistake. But they mostly had no concerns about the app's cryptography.
• History of Cryptography: It used to be a cat and mouse game. The breaking of the German Enigma machine is a notable example. Then Diffie and Hellman in 1976 stated that theoretical developments show promise of providing provably secure cryptosystems.
• Recent Cybersecurity Attacks: There have been successful cybersecurity attacks, but never due to encryption being broken.
• Progress in Solving Problems: We've made great progress in solving many problems like language translation, chess, go, protein folding, and the traveling salesman problem. We have good algorithms but they don't work all the time.
• Theory on Cryptography: The author's latest theory involves compression. Machine learning works by finding a compressed representation of a function. Cryptography is designed to look completely random with no compression. Removing randomness leaves nothing, so modern algorithms can't attack it. This is just the beginning of a theory and not well formalized.
• Mystery and Need for Thought: Cryptography remaining secure is still a big mystery and deserves more thought to understand computational complexity in the real world.