That’s true! Cryptography is amenable to rigorous guarantees and proofs. I gave the example of RSA because even then, the assumption is essentially “we don’t know how to efficiently factor large numbers, and lots of people have tried, so we will assume it can’t be done efficiently.”
There are two broader points though:
Information assurance is about far more than encryption. Encryption involves proofs about algorithms, but it doesn’t guarantee information assurance (for instance, how do you keep private keys private?)
We argue in our second post that theory is limited for deep learning (in a way it is less so in cryptography). Of course, cryptography may itself be relevant to ML safety in the sense that it can be used to secure model weights, etc.
Agreed on (1) and (2). I’m still interested in the counterfactual value of theoretical research in security. One reason is that the “reasoning style” of ELK seems quite similar to that of cryptography – and at least we have some track record with the development of computer security.
That’s true! Cryptography is amenable to rigorous guarantees and proofs. I gave the example of RSA because even then, the assumption is essentially “we don’t know how to efficiently factor large numbers, and lots of people have tried, so we will assume it can’t be done efficiently.”
There are two broader points though:
Information assurance is about far more than encryption. Encryption involves proofs about algorithms, but it doesn’t guarantee information assurance (for instance, how do you keep private keys private?)
We argue in our second post that theory is limited for deep learning (in a way it is less so in cryptography). Of course, cryptography may itself be relevant to ML safety in the sense that it can be used to secure model weights, etc.
Agreed on (1) and (2). I’m still interested in the counterfactual value of theoretical research in security. One reason is that the “reasoning style” of ELK seems quite similar to that of cryptography – and at least we have some track record with the development of computer security.