Neural Networks-Based Cryptography: A Survey

A current trend of research focuses on artificial intelligence based cryptography which although proposed almost thirty years ago could not attract much attention. Abadi and Anderson's work on adversarial cryptography in 2016 rejuvenated the research area which now focuses in building neural networks that are able to learn cryptography using the idea from Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). In this paper, we survey the most prominent research works that cover neural networks based cryptography from two main periods. The first period covers the oldest models that have been proposed shortly after 2000 and the second period covers the more recent models that have been proposed since 2016. We first discuss the implementation of the systems from the earlier era and the attacks mounted on them. After that, we focus on post 2016 era where more advanced techniques are utilized that rely on GANs in which neural networks compete with each other in order to achieve a goal e.g. learning to encrypt a communication. Finally, we discuss security analysis performed on adversarial cryptography models.