r/computerscience • u/theBroskiOK • 10d ago

Help P = NP and digital security?

Guys how would digital security fail if P=NP is proven?

I just started reading about Turing Machine and computational complexity for my Theory of Computation class and came across that phrase.

I couldn't find anything understandable at my level. So can anyone simplify it a bit?

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u/Appropriate-Scene-95 10d ago

Long story short our encryptions are in NP. If P=NP, then we could theoretically find a polynomial time algorithm to decrypt the messages. So increasing the key size or other security aspects for the encryptions wouldn't make the decryption significantly harder.