Vitalik: Users advised not to rush to move funds to new wallets

PANews reported on October 8 that Vitalik posted that he does not advise users to rush to move funds to new wallets, but that they should take seriously the risks AI-accelerated mathematical computation poses to cryptography, and minimize reliance on cryptographic schemes that are vulnerable not only to quantum computing attacks but potentially also to AI attacks. He noted that the new core risk areas are precisely ML-DSA, FHE (fully homomorphic encryption), and lattice-based cryptography. This is another reason, beyond the quantum computing threat, explaining why ECDSA's security may collapse faster than expected, which leads to the suggestion to "use new addresses." At present, most people still believe that "elliptic curve algorithms will be broken, but hash algorithms and lattice-based cryptographic algorithms are secure," yet advances in AI in mathematics over the next two years are very likely to seriously weaken the practical security of lattice-based cryptographic algorithms.

Vitalik's suggestions: where feasible, prioritize hash-based schemes over lattice-based schemes; for any lattice-based scheme, be highly cautious about parameter sizes; for privacy protocols, strongly advise against putting encrypted notes on-chain, and instead transmit them off-chain through third-party mechanisms; if it is not too much trouble, storing funds in addresses that have not yet been used for any transaction is a good idea. For multisig wallets, off-chain confirmation is preferable to on-chain confirmation. This is because, in this way, the signatures of the signer wallets will not be exposed on the public network; in the event that the ECDSA algorithm is broken earlier than expected due to advances in AI technology, the multisig scheme can at least "gracefully degrade" to a "1-of-1" mode (i.e., the party responsible for collecting signatures controls the funds), which is far better than the terrible situation of "funds being up for grabs by anyone."

Previous report, Justin Drake: ECDSA could be broken within months in the worst case, advising large holders to migrate assets to new addresses.