Re:GPT-OSS Reinforcement Learning
by vlovich123 on Saturday September 27, 2025 @01:18PM
(#45397644)
If you’re going to be rude and arrogant, then the level of knowledge you exhibit has to match. SHA-256 decryption would be a front of the world achievement because it would be redefining foundational mathematics since it’s not an encryption algorithm. The words you’d be looking for are either a collision of SHA-256 or breaking encryption algorithms like AES, RSA, ECC etc.
sha-256 is used in the construction of certain encryption algorithms as a primitive but by itself never encrypts anything. If it did you’ve also got middleout compression invented since you could encrypt arbitrary length input into 256 bits of output.
Re:GPT-OSS Reinforcement Learning
by danielhanchen on Saturday September 27, 2025 @01:58PM
(#45397993)
Oh yes if RL breaks SHA-256 that'll be revolutionary - but definitely not that - some folks are for now investigating basic combinations of old school ciphers for now - security applications with RL are most likely for now related to automatically finding attack surfaces and creating defensive layers - I probably should have re-worded "decryption for RL" to just "security for RL" sorry!
Furthermore, I’m very worried that whoever may be paying for this is barking up the wrong tree. I feel that the damage done with extremely bad decryption attempts would massively outweigh the very few times when whatever it “decrypts” is meaningfully close to what the actual text was.
I’m aware of how easy certain things in surveillance are (I.e n-gram analysis is enough to dox anyone on HN in like 10 words of text) - but even sort of decent decryption of SHA-256 would be a literally front page of the world achievement.