Cryptography was the last slow problem

What happened

RSA, a foundational public-key cryptography algorithm used for secure data transmission, arrived in 1977, became mainstream in web traffic security by 1994, and is still useful today. On 28 July of this year, it took an AI about sixty hours to find a cryptographic flaw that two years of expert review had not uncovered.

Minor attacks on it have accumulated slowly, parameters have increased, and it has taken decades for meaningful advances. Even the US government’s Executive Order 14412 that moved post-quantum deadlines to 2030 and 2031 is considered aggressive.

They pulled the timeline forward by half a decade and the industry called it a shock. AI broke one candidate algorithm in no time at all, changing the price of the discovery cycle.