Name: Anonymous 2018-11-09 21:06
Do you think P = NP? Why or why not?
For those who aren't aware:
P means polynomial time. Essentially, problems that are both easy to check and easy to solve. x + 1 = 5.
NP means nondeterministic polynomial time. Long story short, if you have the solution, these problems are easy to verify. But if you don't, then they aren't. They are easy to check, but not easy to solve. Example: if someone gives you a filled out sudoku, you can check to see if it's valid or not. But it's harder to solve a blank sudoku, because that requires solving and checking it. A tripcode is an example of a supposedly one-way function which is, in theory, harder to crack than it is to make/check. But only if you're doing brute-forcing rather than finding a way to crack the algorithm itself.
So why does this matter? Information security. If P = NP, everything is hackable forever and no encryption will ever be secure due to the laws of mathematics. However, many mathematicians think P ≠ NP. But I wonder if that's just wishful thinking. If P = NP, it won't matter if your FOSS software has no backdoors, because it still won't be possible to secure it even then.
For those who aren't aware:
P means polynomial time. Essentially, problems that are both easy to check and easy to solve. x + 1 = 5.
NP means nondeterministic polynomial time. Long story short, if you have the solution, these problems are easy to verify. But if you don't, then they aren't. They are easy to check, but not easy to solve. Example: if someone gives you a filled out sudoku, you can check to see if it's valid or not. But it's harder to solve a blank sudoku, because that requires solving and checking it. A tripcode is an example of a supposedly one-way function which is, in theory, harder to crack than it is to make/check. But only if you're doing brute-forcing rather than finding a way to crack the algorithm itself.
So why does this matter? Information security. If P = NP, everything is hackable forever and no encryption will ever be secure due to the laws of mathematics. However, many mathematicians think P ≠ NP. But I wonder if that's just wishful thinking. If P = NP, it won't matter if your FOSS software has no backdoors, because it still won't be possible to secure it even then.