Alice generates ciphertext based on plain text and key. Bob generates plaintext based on ciphertext and key. Eve generates plaintext based on only ciphertext. Train the three networks across a variety of plaintetxts,
No doubt it's cool, but I would be very surprised if it offered any insight into, or represented an advance for strong cryptography.
I think, instead, it's in reference to the resulting function not having been analyzed. From the article:
The researchers didn't perform an exhaustive analysis of the encryption methods devised by Alice and Bob...
I think it may be that it is "unanalyzable" if you will. Thousands of matrices multiplied together seems as if it would be hard to come to an actual understanding of...
At the risk of glorifying AI, a good analogy might be that understanding a complex neural network is similar in nature to trying to understand how neurons in a human brain are wired, and why they cause some things to happen (or not happen) with some probability. It's more like the practice of medicine than it is engineering.
The difference though is that humans have evolved to be able to explain themselves to others and to themselves, even to the point of confabulating false motivations.
Until we work on making neural nets explain themselves, they'll continue to be black boxes.
Most of the operations will cancel out. If I multiply a number by a fixed series of numbers, even if that list is millions long, I can just pre-multiply them and have a single operation.
The same is likely happening here. Especially if all the operations are algerbraic it would not be hard to simplify and then analyze.
However it is sometimes possible to train a much smaller neural network to imitate a larger network, or to prune irrelevant nodes and connections from a big network.
"In some cases they've been designed by other computers. We don't know exactly how they work."
Timely.
ps: Westworld 2016 seems very ambitious, and so far well receive by U.S. audience. I wonder if it will accelerate or slow the distribution.