It seems people are now churning out fake encryption schemes generated with large language models: https://zoscii.com/why-en.html

Checking out the code, we see that this is essentially a one-time pad. If the key is reused, the encryption is easily defeated. Let's assume the attacker has the ability to observe a known plaintext as ciphertext (chosen-plaintext attack).

1. Generate a random key and encrypt a secret message with it:

$ dd if=/dev/random of=secretkey count=8
$ echo "This is a secret message" > secretmessage.txt
$ zencode secretkey secretmessage.txt secretmessage.enc

2. Implement chosen plaintext attack and recover the encryption key:

$ perl -e 'for($i=0;$i<256;$i++){print chr($i)x65536}' > chosenplaintext
$ zencode secretkey chosenplaintext chosenplaintext.enc
$ rm secretkey
$ ./findkey chosenplaintext chosenplaintext.enc recovered-secretkey

3. Decrypt any message encrypted with the secretkey:

$ zdecode recovered-secretkey secretmessage.enc recovered-secretmessage.txt
$ cat recovered-secretmessage.txt
This is a secret message
$

I do not know if the author of this scheme is outright malicious or just fooled into believing what the LLM is telling him. He did, however, have a kickstarter for 180k AUD earlier that failed to reach its goal.

#llm #enshittification #encryption #cryptography