Encryption & Key Management
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RSAC Conference
Cryptography Researcher Paul Kocher on AI’s Threat to Security’s Edges
Cybersecurity is entering its most uncertain period in decades, and even leading cryptographers can’t agree on where the greatest threats are coming from or how quickly they will emerge.
See Also: Taming the Rise of Shadow AI Agents
“I think of cryptography as these golden, perfect bricks that you can try to build things with, but all the mortar in between and the pieces around them aren’t as robust, and AI can really chip away at those edges much more effectively than humans can,” said Paul Kocher, independent cryptography and data security researcher and co-author of the SSL/TLS protocol.
He said artificial intelligence will not break foundational algorithms such as AES or SHA-3, but will accelerate vulnerability discovery in protocols and implementations at a rate human defenders cannot match.
In this video interview with Information Security Media Group at RSAC Conference 2026, Kocher also discussed:
- Why quantum computing’s threat to public key cryptography remains genuinely unresolved among leading experts;
- How AI-driven traffic analysis can defeat cryptographic security goals without breaking any algorithm;
- Why cuts to U.S. research funding are undermining the innovations needed to defend against an increasingly uncertain threat landscape.
Kocher founded Cryptography Research in 1995 and led the company for more than 20 years. His technical work includes discovering differential power analysis, co-discovering Spectre and architecting many security hardware cores. His current security projects explore cryptography, compilers, AI and computer architectures.
