It is the complexity of the calculations underpinning applications used in home banking and online financial transactions that guarantees their security, according to Luca Trevisan, professor of Computer Science and director of the master's degree in Artificial Intelligence at Bocconi University in Milan.
"In fact, there are things that algorithms will not be able to do: there are types of calculations for which efficient algorithms will not be developed," said Trevisan at the inaugural lecture of the Invernizzi Foundation Chair in Computer Science, which he holds.
"Online security for home banking or financial transactions is based on computationally based apps that, if efficiency were possible, could leave the field open to unauthorised transactions,” he continued. “For instance, it might be possible to infiltrate a secure system, impersonating the user of an online banking service that requires identification. It is true that there are computational problems that might allow this, but no algorithms would allow it in a reasonable amount of time: it would take billions of years,” said the researcher, who returned to Italy in 2019 after spending many years in the United States, at Columbia, Berkeley and Stanford universities. “There are calculations that would require billions of operations, for which there is no shortcut" and that not even an artificial intelligence system could perform, concluded Trevisan.
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