Google's AI Taught Itself To Encrypt Messages

A game between three deep learning entities proved that AI can figure out encryption on its own.

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In the wake of the massive DDoS attack that brought down huge swaths of the internet last week, strengthening cybersecurity is on everyone's minds. It's tough to devise systems that are truly secure, because as security evolves, so do the people trying to hack those systems. But a new experiment from Google showed a possible way forward using artificial intelligence.

Google created an encryption game using three distinct entities--Alice, Eve, and Bob--created by deep learning neural networks. Alice sent thousands of 16 character strings of zeros and ones to Bob, encrypting them with a shared key. Eve sat in the middle, trying to decrypt the messages. As the game progressed, Eve caught up quickly to the encryption, and Alice was forced to adapt, coming up with new styles of encryption that Eve couldn't crack. The networks were not taught anything about encryption before the game began, meaning that the strategies they came up with were entirely original.

Bob's performance improved dramatically while Eve's accuracy fell.
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For the first 7,000 messages, Alice and Bob communicated in a simple code that was easy for Eve to unlock. But over the next 6,000 messages, Alice's encryption became more advanced. While Bob could still decrypt all the messages accurately, Eve was only able to guess about 7 of every 16 characters, about the same percentage you'd get from flipping a coin.

It's hard for researchers to understand what happened in the game without intensive analysis--these were just computers making up their own systems, not following along with some script. They may never crack the code created by their own AI. But the success of the experiment shows that deep learning could be a valuable tool in the constantly shifting world of cybersecurity.

Source: Google via Quartz

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