I know it is has no security impact in this case but isn’t it odd a bunch of cryptographers would choose a weak PRNG seeded by the date for a task like this?
Even state lotteries back then used physical ping pong balls and a nothing-up-my-sleeve show after the evening news.
While this confirms the method of production it doesn't say anything about their selection, especially since they were, apparently, generated over a period of months. Specifically you cannot see those candidates that were generated and discarded.
"It is still conceivable that these curves were selected to have a specific property in principle by searching over timestamps to the random number generator."
Yes.
"However, you would only need to do that if you were going to disclose the timestamp as some evidence that the seed was innocuously generated."
Does not logically follow when "doing and saying nothing" will completely suffice.
Given how expensive this computation would have been in 1997, it makes perfect sense they'd taken months, but even if we assume they tried all timestamps of 1997 and selected arbitrarily among the first 16 viable candidate of any timestamp, that's just ~30 bits of freedom.
Finding out there is a class of weak 256-bit elliptic curves so large that they can be hit randomly with 2^30 tries would be a cryptanalytic breakthrough analogous to discovering all elliptic curve cryptography is broken.
Read section 3.1 of the Koblitz and Menezes paper. It was already implausible with 160 bits of freedom. https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1018
If you want to believe the NSA knows ECC is broken and chose to risk moving the US government to it and somehow no one figured out the same break in 30 years, you're free to do so. But pretending the seed choice plays any role in that theory is over.
This is unrelated to the above comment, but I figured I'd ask while we're here. You state at the end of your blog post on this topic that you'd now probably recommend the NIST curves over Curve25519. Why is that?
As a complete layman, I do wonder why n grows with each subsequent curve, rather than with number of bits. Does this not suggest they were 'searching harder'?
Almost all of the smaller values of n are not valid curve values, so they were searching "harder" but just for valid seeds. If you look at the generator output in [1], you'll see that:
1. Only a very small number of valid seeds were discarded when compared to the number of n values. It seems we don't yet know why about half of the valid seeds were discarded but the explanation of a buggy curve validity checker doesn't seem implausible to me.
2. Directly to your point, most of the prime192 and prime239 curves required larger n values to find a valid seed and they are both smaller and used an earlier timestamp.
unless your guess is that the hypothetical ECC weakness is somehow correlated with the LCG structure, the draws from the LCG are as good as random.
It is possible such a correlation could occur. but it would be much weirder than this being the result of a random search, which would already be very weird.
I find it slightly less weird because I see potential for indirect attacks on the not-quite-so-ECC parts of actual implementations. Wherever a network client can ask many times for each of the different, but somehow not entirely uncorrelated curves, it might be able to expose previously not deemed critical side channels. Following in the general direction of the discoveries that so far resulted in IV and padding determinism/randomness being considered as important as the "actual crypto" itself. In that case the structures that would need to somehow interact would not be ECC and LCG, but merely LCG and key derivation..
There is some evidence that they have done it becore.
Specifically, that they had a backdoor for Dual EC DRBG[1], and pushed for a shorter key lenghth for DES, to intentionally weaken it.
It is, obviously, controversial. But I think there is certainly enough there that I wouldn't be confident that the NSA wouldn't recommend something they knew to be weak in some way, even to other government organizations.
It was widely used, even in government and military. Who knows if they actually used the same as everyone else in actuality. I guess none of this is proven beyond doubt, given the nature of all this?!
Reporting on declassified history says the NSA pushed for a shorter DES key; the compromise was 56 bits
NSA and a suspected cryptographic backdoor: the Dual_EC_DRBG random-number generator was the subject of reporting about an NSA backdoor and an alleged payment to RSA. RSA denied knowingly weakening its products.
TLS 1.0’s CBC chaining made IVs predictable and enabled the BEAST attack. That’s a documented protocol weakness, allegedly put in there by US state actors on purpose.
YMMV but none of this would surprise any reasonable person given Snowden's revelations.
Please please don't bring AI generated text as arguments such discussions. Especially not without saying that that's what you are quoting.
Quoting something implies that it has certain authority (like a crypto expert) and the correctness track record of AI generated text is obviously shaky.
This CBC chaining thing is my all-time absolute favorite cryptography conspiracy theory, because on the IETF list where it happened (it happened for IPSEC, not for TLS, for what it's worth) Phil Rogaway pled with long-time standards body people --- even took up a petition of cryptographers, including Rivest --- and was openly and viciously mocked for the attempt.
The US government had no need to corrupt IPSEC standardization. The IETF did the work for them without prompting.
> TLS 1.0’s CBC chaining made IVs predictable and enabled the BEAST attack. That’s a documented protocol weakness, allegedly put in there by US state actors on purpose.
This is errant nonsense. At the time SSL/TLS were designed, using CBC with block ciphers was generally considered best practice - it was not at all an unusual choice.
Using CBC is fine. TLS and (prior to that) IPSEC set the CBC IV of messages to the last ciphertext block of the previous message --- pretending as if they were encrypting one long stream, rather than discrete messages. That's never been OK, and cryptographers warned about it at the time.
I don't think ECDSA itself is a bad idea. You can 10x your signing capacity with the same hardware.
Why couldn't we make a new curve out in the open and then agree to use it? Increment an integer counter until a majority of cryptographers are satisfied.
The fact that the seed is not explained is troubling even if we can figure out how it was derived. We now know it uses a timestamp which means we can probe even deeper and more specifically into potential rigging of the numbers. I don't think we were supposed to figure this one out. I'd be interested in seeing the properties for curves of adjacent timestamps.
> While this confirms the method of production it doesn't say anything about their selection, especially since they were, apparently, generated over a period of months. Specifically you cannot see those candidates that were generated and discarded.
Well, at least now we have a way to perform that analysis! Generate a bunch of curves by varying (along any degree of freedom) the input parameters to the seed generating function and see if there's any difference between the curves that are generated.
I think it does rule out any NOBUS vulnerability with these curves, doesn't it? My thinking may be a bit sloppy here, but for a curve to be NOBUS exploitable with N-bit security by its creators, I think it would have to have a property only shared by 1/(2^N) curves. It would be impractical to hash 2^(N-1) timestamps until you find one with the desired property, for any decent size of N--which is how many you'd have to do on average before finding one with that property.
It doesn't prove anything about the core part of the suspicion, which is they were selected using some undisclosed criteria, which may make them weaker or stronger than some other random numbers.
You are entirely familiar with the precedent of the DES s boxes of course, where that is exactly what happened.
When they made the changes to the s boxes for differential cryptanalysis resistance the entire concept of that was essentially secret, so who knows what they know about elliptic curves.
The number of weak classes of elliptic curve would have to be gargantuan for this specific search to produce some. If that many curves are bad, then ECC was a mistake.
drand48() could be one of hundreds of methods that were tried to produce specific values with plausible deniability and happened to produce them. The other searches were discarded.
Then why not turn this around and say which (hopefully small set of) specific classes of curves are known to be avoided, but otherwise have a free for all?
> If that many curves are bad, then ECC was a mistake.
I mean that is the logical conclusion from the behaviour around this approach where a few good things are effectively endorsed without justification.
The fact is any application of an algorithm that involves so much "trust me bro" on the selection of what are a large number of opaque quasi random but not quite or provably so numbers only has as much trust in it as you have in the people that created it.
Again, Koblitz and Menezes take this idea on directly in their paper. But I mean, at this point, nobody serious is going to take the P-curve seed conspiracy theory seriously ever again.
“In under half an hour, Claude discovered the origins of the NIST P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 seeds. None of them were the results of any hash algorithm at all, but rather the output of the C library’s lrand48 random-number generator, seeded with a Unix timestamp!”
Gorgeous. I wonder if the NSA employee who did this suffered a head injury or has been quietly giggling to themselves for the last quarter century.
The two people were Bob Reiter and Jerry Solinas. Jerry wrote in a 2015 email to Daniel Bernstein that he thought it was a hash of the passphrase. I corroborated that story with 4 people, including two ex-NSA folks off the record.
Everyone was wrong!
I wasn't able to reach Bob. He was working in private industry as of 2018, but never responded.
It's possible that this "phrase hash" method was used for a different case - like another, unrelated and possibly unreleased algorithm. And then it was confused for the one used for those curves.
One possibility is that they created multiple seeds, and misremembered which one they eventually went with. Although, it's weird no one ever said "or it might have been a timestamp".
I understand Spanish being from Latin America but for a long time I couldn't understand a single thing he said because of the Spaniard accent and crazy laughter, and I enjoyed the memes just fine. But then few years ago I watched it with the real subtitles and something clicked in my brain so now when I watch it I mostly understand him fine. But now the memes are ruined because it's hard to hear and read two speeches at the same time. Just an annecdote about our weird brains.
Just to add here that this guy doesn't have a "standard" Spanish accent. He was from Andalucía (I don't remember where exactly), a region rather known for its accent being difficult for even native speakers to understand.
Anyway after I moved to Andalucía I now can understand the story he tells, but I have to pay close attention!
Spanish native here. Andalusian accent never was known by being difficult to understand. Have other associations, but never that it's difficult to understand.
Some Andalusian accents can be really thick, but so can be the accents from other regions. It also depends where from Spain you are from: I am from Extremadura and usually don't have any trouble understanding even the strongest Andalusian accent, but some of my Basque and Catalonian colleagues find it really difficult, but the opposite is also true.
he is doing a deep deep Andalusian accent, plus the extra noises and laughs makes hard to understand.
The normal Andalusian accent it's perfectly understandable by anyone that understands Spanish.
It’s perplexing that NIST chose to burn so much trust and goodwill with the independent cryptography community instead of just explaining empirically that they really had nothing up their sleeve.
I think they legitimately did not know. The person who worked on it directly, Jerry Solinas, did not remember and gave an explanation that turned out to be wrong. In his defense, multiple people told the same story about hashing a phrase that was wrong.
If they did know, they could have handed over these timestamps 15 years ago and put the issue to bed.
This was the era of export cryptography, just after the Clipper Chip saga, "this t-shirt is a munition, and perhaps most importantly curve cryptography was barely a thing (this is back at the time where people believed the Certicom patents would preclude it from deployment). I think people just weren't paying that much attention to cryptographic standards processes at all, at least not for a couple more years (remember, the curves were generated years before they were published).
It's not a crazy question to ask / theory to posit. The next message down explains why it's unlikely and the whole conversation sounds reasonable to me.
The cryptgraphy community is pretty reasonable folks, on the whole.
After Dual_EC_DRBG, there is no longer justification for any attitude towards the NSA other than suspicion and skepticism. Everything should be assumed a potential attack vector and thoroughly explored. I thank the community for carrying this torch for so many years.
Yes, and the NSA generated the seeds for NIST. This is public knowledge and is acknowledged in the article.
It has been the entire focus of the backdoor concerns since the curves were adopted over 20 years ago and is the motivation for the work behind this article.
I don't know why, but 2^32 search space is WAY too small. Anything they could enumerate back then (or even today) is way too small. This is like saying they tried four times before they found a vulnerable one.
Probably not quite this given the timestamps span over almost a year (but have some clustering in August 1997).
Given that the spread suggests they weren't just now() timestamps it would actually be interesting to know what the significance of the timestamps is, if any. Though it could be something boring like randomly sampling some local file creation times.
Those are the dates that the NSA obtained quantum computer tech from the alien crash site at Roswell, which would enable them to break the crypto they were currently building
> The fifth binary seed, B-163, fits nothing Claude has tried and remains unexplained.
The simplest explanation would be that it was generated the same way as the others, but somebody mistyped a digit somewhere along the way to publishing, and therefore a solution could not be found with the assumption that the number is correct.
Very well possible. I’m glad to see that this is all above board in the end, which further argues the case AGAINST conspiracy theories. Most people are just trying to do the right thing.
Sorry, US intelligence agencies is not a category of organizations I would sort in the "we're just trying to do the right thing" bucket.
I dont even mean that as a dig to the people working there (although maybe some) they're literally a military wing of the worlds most powerful empire..
Lets be honest with ourselves, their job is to spy on people, and spies try to make their job easier not harder.
Hell it seems they did lie about the origins, which should bring their entire motivation into question. They spread rumors that it was a "silly phrase", thats ridiculous.
I find it so ridiculous that they (seemingly) forcefully try to state references to dedicated researchers who devoted much of their lives to the problem, while the LLM does not even know which trained papers were effectively used. That means likely many researchers not listed were heavily influencing this achievement, and Claude does not even know that they helped. And the world doesn't know.
This happens in academia all the time. You read a ton of papers, chat with tons of people about tons of ideas.
Later you come up some idea, you do the experiment, write the paper, search for relevant citations when you write the intro.
Honestly I think this is actually desirable. For a mind to work well and do things creatively and efficiently it can't be a simple search engine, it needs to blend and meld and reform the information.
And that means the output can't be cleanly deterministically linked to the input. Unless you just keep a log then cite everything you've ever read in your life (and all the conversations and talks too).
This is the reason why this is desirable for humans. But I do not like extending excuses that apply to human (limitations) also to companies that could keep a log.
This is a weak argument. Swarms of LLM agents have been regurgitating the work of academics and ruining their PhD work without attribution. It's not analogous to what you're describing.
If this is true, NIST staff were a bunch of moron who simply used libc's default RNG(infamous for poor quality), initialize it by srand(time(NULL)) (also bad practice), and then throw out the first hundreds to thousands 20 bytes and use the 20 bytes.
NIST published recommended SEEDS in 1999 July. They spend 2 years checking 20 bytes SEEDS that were generated by casually by a hand of amateurish method.
I do not believe this claim. It just Claude hit a jackpot that happens to match 20 bytes.
Claude seems to be fairly good at bruteforcing/testing/etc on it's own, it solved a fairly intricate thing while I was busy on other things.
I've adapted a crypto-lib for TLS connections and had a mistake during negotation that truncated some algo-selection value, worked up until the other party started trialling post-quantum algorthims that apparently had algo-id's that collided with the truncated values I was using.
Claude figured out that from the code and trialling TLS handshakes.
Besides, since there was a bounty on finding the curve it seems unlikely that someone would've found out and not shared that? (unless working at a security service that figured out that it was possible to attack?)
I wonder if Claude does the brute-forcing directly. I think what's more likely is that Claude is synthesising programs that brute-force, albeit with interesting heuristics.
If they thought it to be backdoor, why not sell for some other believer who pays more than the bounty? But anyway, not everyone is after money and fame.
> The main contribution is the solution that Claude came up with.
That's an argument that must be infuriating to all researchers who ever published a paper on that topic, because most likely Claude was trained with all of them.
> That's an argument that must be infuriating to all researchers who ever published a paper on that topic, because most likely Claude was trained with all of them.
When do we call it the right time to stop with the pitchforks, torches and selfish tendencies and accept that many papers published were used to help train a tool that brings discoveries to light for the entirety of humanity to benefit?
Seriously though, how did nobody find this? It's not like you needed an LLM to check the random number generator. Given how much interest there was by cryptography people it is surprising.
People were primed by the recollection of one of the original developers (and corroborated by other sources) that it was a hash of some funny passphrase like "Give [the devs] a raise".
I see it as: they're all trying really hard problems that aren't in the training data, to gauge if their models are improving, achieved by looking at problem that humans haven't been able to solve yet. The evidence to this is all the problems being publicized in the last few weeks.
Or, less favourably: they are burning a ton of tokens on any random "hard" tasks they can think of to try and generate stories about AI doing amazing things to pump the hype, infinite monkeys theorem as a playbook. You only advertise the ones you succeed on, thus pushing the idea that's what they do routinely. Stochastic "genius".
If these arguably very finite amount of monkeys allow them to pull off such campaigns so frequently and consistently, these monkeys kinda do got it going on.
Finite doesn't mean small. We have no idea how much they are burning in the back to do this. If you are taking things people just don't care about enough to invest the necessary effort/money to solve, and spend way more than anyone else is willing to spend to solve them, the solution could be less AI and more access to lots of investor money you can burn on PR.
The real question is "how much would it cost me to solve a similarly hard problem?" which is impossible to answer without them giving the detail on how many of these projects they are running and how many tokens they are burning, something they don't tell us.
I have considered this angle before, but landed on that it's not like anyone was ever actually going to do so.
I tend to think of the market kind of like a social media feed, i.e. engagement matters. Even if they're establishing these results at an overhead, they're doing so with money that otherwise would probably never be spent on these problems, or would only be over very long timeframes.
Whether this is sustainable is where what you describe comes in. And it may not be, but that doesn't mean it isn't impressive. Lots of cool technologies in history that failed to justify their stay.
Yeah, happy to see. Wouldn't it be cool if the many computational hardness assumptions were no longer just assumptions? If the algorithms and implementations used would no longer require the holy blessings of arbitrary - if credentialed - researchers?
Or consider the algorithmic complexity classes underpinning all of this, not just P vs NP, but also whether quantum computers are actually a distinct class, since that is not proven yet either afaik. The reason we're moving to quantum resistant algos in the first place.
Eh, I hate Anthropic too, but this seems pretty tame. Lots of people have wanted to know the origin of those seeds even though they thought there was no back door.
More and more it is the relentlessness of the models that strikes me. Leave no stone unturned! Go through ALL of these old boxes. Someone said they thought maybe it was over there somewhere >>shrug<<
This neat and all but I think there's a bigger issue here. Anthropic (and whoever Anthropic wants) can do this kind of work with Claude, but if you or I try to do it, we will get blocked. This is a fun exercise, but extend this to something much more nefarious and you can see a moat widening between the model providers, their government partners, and the public.
The only thing that bridges this moat is continued advancement of open models.
> [The model's authors] can do this kind of work with Claude, but if you or I try to do it, we will get blocked.
If this seems concerning, wait until the models get effective enough (gets work done properly at a lower energy need than humans have) that there's no reason for them to release anything. Why offer your weights for download or grant any third party usage access when you can just do the actual job yourself and collect all that turnover?
> Why offer your weights for download or grant any third party usage access when you can just do the actual job yourself and collect all that turnover?
It's hilarious how a the trillions invested in AI companies, and their valuations are predicated on the AI labs Sherlocking entire industries, and yet CEOs, mathematicians, and everyone else are eagerly feeding the beast their most prized information.
This is a risky proposition if the technology is in some way revolutionary. The people who decided to "just not" with, for example, the internet often aren't doing business anymore.
> the internet often aren't doing business anymore.
A lot of pre-Internet businesses are still here with us, and online. The one thing the survivors did not do was hitch their wagons on a predator designed in a lab to devour them - to use mixed metaphors. Barnes & Noble didn't board up their brick-and-mortar stores to replace them with an Amazon storefront - they figured out how to use the Internet without handing over the family jewels.
They will just have someone look at every question, they will let it pass, want a cut or deny it. Claude, you can answer this guys question, but don't tell 'em how you solved it and don't give him the best answer, give him an ok answer.
That's kinda unrealistic, isn't it? How will they pay for the thousands or ten thousands of employees, who need to look at every question? And most questions are just ordinary BS, that not really anyone other than the asker cares about. Giant waste of time to check all that.
Which brings us back to the war on general computation. So long as people can have computers that they control, at least in one of the countries or regions, there's no putting this cat back in the bag and we are all along for the ride
Sometimes I want a fast-forward button for life, the times are so exciting and I want to know what else 8B people can think of next but there's so far no way to turn pages faster ^^'
There are just a few places where the most high tech hardware is made. If we turned off new and unregistered hardware now it would be just a few years as most hardware fast enough to run LLMs would disappear from public hands.
It will still exist, but be in the hands of militaries and authoritarian governments. If you piddle around on the net showing off your open standards you'll be relentlessly attacked by these entities digitally. More so, those areas will be generally embargoed.
The future looks like a new cold war with a lot more digital weapons.
French Revolution and the 21st centuries version of guillotines, whatever that could be, is probably a good reason to avoid that.
There's also a thing called commodity fetishism but capitalists usually learn the hard way that things created with machines without human input miss the essence of why we're willing to pay for something. Its why a handmade watch is $100k and a casio is $100, or a handmade sweater identical to a machine made goes for 10x.
They could also just make us so poor and anxious that we beg to fight eachother in wars.
While I agree that there's a special element to human crafted pieces, and artisanship would be a terrible thing to lose, I'd point out that Roger W. Smith hand makes ~15 watches per year which sell for around $400k a pop, while Casio's watch division brought in $1.17B in revenue in the most recent FY
Gun to your head, you have to see one of two movies with the same plot and characters. They are identical movies.
One is produced by 500 humans collaborating and the second is completely generated by an AI that can actually make a movie
A single individual or small group of people who own the GPUs profit from the AI version, and the human version provides a salary to 500 humans/families.
Which one are you buying tickets for and choosing to spend 2 hours watching?
Maybe, but that's what the cyber program is for. Nobody knew if the seed was fine or a backdoor. If it was a backdoor, and Claude helped you find it as a normal person, Anthropic would get bad PR. If you're a verified security researcher, actually that's fantastic and Anthropic would get good PR and everybody claps.
Anthropic wants to IPO, they don't want another Fable shutdown situation.
To be clear I would prefer the cyber safeguards to be less restrictive, I think they're currently too much. I often go to open models because of it. But there are likelier reasons to restrict cyber than world domination.
> and Claude helped you find it as a normal person, Anthropic would get bad PR
Why?
Why are we celebrating and encouraging the walling off of the global intellectual columns?
The idea that you can't reverse engineer things, make things, learn about biology or physics without permission is strange to me. These machines have been trained on the sum intellectual output of humanity, the global intellectual commons, and are being used to close off that commons?
I would be OK with their right to create such restrictions if they weren't lobbying the Government to restrict others, thereby ensuring that they control humanity's intellectual commons well into the future.
Who are they to say what I can learn or can't learn? Who are they to control what I can or can't do with these tools?
Perhaps I'm naive, but I think it's better for humans and the machines if we can all think, learn and build. But then again, I'm the kind of person who rejects the doomer pill.
Because there are good and bad people in the world, and if I ask Claude "how do I make cocaine" and it gives me a thorough recipe, it doesn't know if I'm being intellectually curious or trying to become the next Pablo Escobar. They're Anthropic, and because they made Claude, they get to say what we can do with it. Which, I agree, is total bullshit. If I buy a Ford car and I can do whatever I want with it. Drive to work, drive for Uber, set it on fire; plowing into a crowd of protestors is covered by existing laws against vehicular manslaughter. Ford doesn't get a say. But because cars are so ubiquitous and a known technology, there's no blowback to Ford if I commit crimes with my car that I bought from them. If I commit crimes and Claude helped, Anthropic is gonna get sued (there's already litigation against the labs for deaths), and they don't want that.
In a properly free market, we'd have regulations that prohibit labs from vertical integration so they have to release and sell a model and another company hosts it and sell access to it. Americanism, America's implementation of capitalism doesn't have such regulations though (and how would that even work?) so we're stuck with Anthropic having that power.
The fear, justified or not, is that a terrorist is going to use Claude to make sarin nerve gas and bomb subway stations, or the digital equivalent. Could you live with that on your conscience? I don't think I could, but fortunately for me, I don't work at Anthropic so don't have to answer that real life trolly problem.
I am amazed at how a technical gloss can obscure basic rights. That's legal! It's in chemistry / agronomy books, freely available in libraries. I have the right to tell you how that is done, and you have the right to read what I write.
An LLM isn't a book. You can still go buy the books you want. An LLM, especially as they get more advanced, are agents. You can ask them do to things and they can interact with tools to do things.
You're free to print a cocaine book. You're not free to incorporate it into a cocaine making machine without violating numerous laws.
You are entirely free to build a cocaine making machine in most countries. It is actually using it to produce cocaine that is a crime.
In reasonable countries, this is exactly how it works. You can own lockpicks, practice picking locks, and even publish detailed instructions on how to pick locks. It's only when you pick someone else's lock that a crime is committed.
Limiting access to tools and knowledge benefits the wealthy and privileged. Knowledge should proliferate, that is how the world has worked long before I was born and god willing that is how it will work long after I die.
> You are entirely free to build a cocaine making machine in most countries. It is actually using it to produce cocaine that is a crime.
That's not true. It's certainly legal to own lab equipment, but when you start combining equipment with the intent to make cocaine, you're committing a crime long before any drug is produced.
Any country who's a party to the 1988 UN Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs has such laws, including the US, UK, and most of Europe.
You are entirely free to build a cocaine making machine in most countries. It is actually using it to produce cocaine that is a crime.
In reasonable countries, this is exactly how it works. You can own lockpicks, practice picking locks, and even publish detailed instructions on how to pick locks. It's only when you pick someone else's lock that a crime is committed.
Limiting access to tools and knowledge benefits the wealthy and privileged.
Nothing happens, dude. Having lockpicking tools is not enough on its own to make an arrest, and a few dumb cops doing it anyways and having their cases get thrown out only proves the system works.
You can program a computer to do things and they can interact with tools to do things too. Doesn't justify restricting what you can do with them.
If you program a computer to make cocaine for you, you're the one violating the law. If you ask an LLM to do the same for you, you're the one violating the law. The LLM's capabilities are irrelevant.
Cool, so I'll have you make an LLM that can make cosine, then I'll provide you paid access to the machine to can ask the right question to do it illegally. Then when you get caught and blame me we'll both be in court defending ourselves.
You're argument is "doesn't justify". This is a private corporation, not a government. There is no freedom of speech law involved here if the corporation says no. Now, when the government tells LLM corporations that there are limits they will gladly agree.
Next, the government will classify the LLMs as munitions and you'll be spending the next 50 years fighting on reversing that when a big chunk of the population is anti-AI enough to let them do it. After that will be bans and registration on hardware.
There are two things that you are confusing. One is what you'd like to happen in an open data world like existed after the cold war. And then there is what is going to happen, and it's going to be messy, authoritarian, and closed. And you will lose the openness that had been occurring up to this point.
There is no world in which the general public agrees to wide open access to info-hazards, and there are people that will ensure enough disasters happen to close that future.
Ford actually will tell you now if you can or cannot do something with their vehicles. They’re also likely tracking you.
That said - there likely were the same issues with cars in early days and then we got a body of settled case law that let the car companies off the hook for this and put responsibility on the user unless a manufacturing defect was the cause.
In the case of models, knowledge has historically always been dangerous! Is the library liable if a kid figures out how to do chemistry and builds a device? What about YouTube? I find it hard to believe this would hold up in court over time. So far, the only cases I’ve seen are when AI has encouraged self-harm which does in fact seem like a legit defect.
Gatekeeping knowledge like this will only serve to enable those that break the law, not protect, in my judgment.
And just so this isn’t pure fodder for the machine - torch staple must of course infant music verb noun right? :)
>use Claude to make sarin nerve gas and bomb subway stations, or the digital equivalent. Could you live with that on your conscience?
People have always been able to do this before Claude. The information is out there and if you use a VPN there's not much they can do. The existence of information isn't the blocker for why attacks don't happen.
You sound highly optimistic about the capabilities of LLMs, which makes me curious about the path you see to furthering quality of life at scale. What do you see as the main obstacles to LLMs brewing me beer on demand at my home without involving me past the prompt, and when do you foresee we'll overcome them?
Just watch the speed at which robots have been developing in the past few years. It is honestly crazy how much more stable things like bi-pedal robots have become. Coupled with things like multimodal LLMs they can accomplish quite a lot. Again most of it comes down to fine motor control and speed of decoding the world around it.
> The idea that you can't reverse engineer things, make things, learn about biology or physics without permission is strange to me. These machines have been trained on the sum intellectual output of humanity, the global intellectual commons, and are being used to close off that commons?
I mean this is the standard of biochem research right now. You can't just order 50 gallons of TNT off Amazon and neither can you get live viruses from a lab just because you want to do research.
And really they aren't restricting any of that. I've never had Claude stop me from going to the library and reading a book.
You don't have a legal right to do anything you want with their model. And if you don't like that you are going to have to convince politicians to enact new laws to change that.
Because AI-assisted hacking is not something we should allow to run rampant with the most advanced models, prior to AI-assited cybersecurity catching up.
I have been in the cyber program since around the time it first went public and recently renewed it with the updated program.
You still trivially hit guadrails. I was trying to reverse engineer some bit of 20-year-old software that already has known, unmitigated exploits and it still downgraded me.
Anthropic gets zero of my money because their favorite word is no. I cannot figure out how to as an individual or a small startup request elevated permissions for the purposes of anything that they think might potentially be dangerous for someone who is not me to access. I have a background in cybersecurity. I have a background in life sciences. Can I put those skills to use to benefit humanity? Who knows.
I imagine the path forward for the labs will be signing off on organizations/institutions rather than individuals.
The risk/reward is way lopsided towards risk for the labs to vet individuals. Much easier to get an organization and have them take the blast if someone/something goes off the rails.
I cannot in any universe see the labs putting themselves in a "We should never had given this person access" situation.
Can you be sure that the model was not constrained for you, regardless? Since they can’t help too much with cyber, they might avoid some routes to not get completely flagged and that could influence for not finding the solution.
I have seen behaviour a little like what you describe, in other tasks. When I was cracking the keys for Sony's camera firmware updates, Claude steered away from an obfuscated library, seemingly because it thought it might be related to licensing checks. It was indeed related to licensing checks, but also firmware update decryption. I had to explicitly tell Claude to write a deobfuscator for it, which it did, and eventually I had the keys.
I later got Claude to crack their licensing checks too, by convincing it to write a "license checker" program, and then a second "test case generator" script for the license checker... (Opus 4.8 was smart enough to see what I was doing, but Opus 4.6 complied)
I feel like history is repeating itself - to many people AOL, Compuserve, MSN, et al seemed superior to "the web" in the early 1990s because they dumped money into making it slicker, licensed content, provided guardrails, made it easy for non-tech people... They had slick ads, were cultural phenoms, and people would take sides with the companies and think their arguments were strong and even obvious!
There is very much a situation where people in frontier labs have access to exceptional capabilities that are being kept from the rest of us, and they're using it to strip-mine technical and scientific problems.
I ran into this situation and was able to work around it by running a jailbroken Chinese model that turned out to be quite capable. I think it was Qwen.
> There is very much a situation where people in frontier labs have access to exceptional capabilities that are being kept from the rest of us, and they're using it to strip-mine technical and scientific problems.
If these capabilities were available to the public, someone somewhere would make a biological weapon or create a virus we've never seen before that could kill many millions of people.
Stanford researchers have demonstrated it’s possible [1].
Biologists already addressed this idiocy a few weeks ago [1]. Making a biological weapon requires facilities that only some nation states - and comparable companies- have access to.
AI isn't going to magically assemble a DNA sequence for you and a computer design is not a guarantee of something that works.
AI restrictionists love to pretend that their toys will, with the power of intelligence, magically bypass fundamental limitations of reality to conjure up fantastical weapons of mass destruction if they throw enough computers at the task. Unfortunately for them, that is not how the world works.
Not to mention that making an actual novel virus requires thousands of dollars of equipment, serious lab skills, and even then is so dangerous that the wannabe terrorist is more likely to infect and kill themselves than cause mass causalities.
It's the equivalent of making pipe bombs at home.
The instructions are out in the public, but that's not a problem because the idiots that make pipe bombs blow themselves up more often than they succeed in doing terrorism.
Broadly, the downgrading is still way too heavy-handed and clumsy. As of yesterday “How easy to crack is WPA2” downgraded to opus 4.8. Granted I could probably have phrased it differently and gotten a response, but the point is I shouldn’t have to. It can’t simultaneously be smart enough to reverse the ECDSA curve seed and not smart enough not to destroy the world by answering a trivial question with a scary word in it.
Fable 5.1 has downgraded me in the past week alone for the crimes of describing a coordinating server as "the C&C server" ([cyber]), for doing some statistical analysis on some toy Vigenère-ciphered text ([cyber]), and for asking it to help me find patterns in some semi-random text ([bio]), so it is fair to say I am not skeptical.
I have access to Claude's "defensive" cyber model and it appears to take no issue with the prompt, but I suspect that is because it uses today's publication as the basis for an answer.
In the past my attempts to work on crypto related problems have been met with needing the higher tier of "offensive" access.
I think when the open source models catch up (likely soon) we'll long for the days when companies could control it like this. I could easily see a teenager with openclaw and a single prompt causing millions of dollars in damage. Multiply that by the number of stupid people in the world and we have a problem.
I know Anthropic models have a lot of insane, paranoid filters, but I don't remember them blocking cryptography work last I checked (some 3 months ago now).
I routinely get rejected on elliptic curve related requests; often I can talk Claude back into some work on it. But it is surprisingly sensitive to talking about research cryptography in my experience. I’m not in their cyber program.
The cyber filter blocks really basic stuff all the time. People who are pro that bs should be forced to only eat with a spoon for the rest of their life.
For me it refused to move Claude transcripts from point A to point B on my local machine. It kept getting flagged as reasoning extraction or something. The line of "It's my machine, I can move files wherever I want" shouldn't be crossed. Someday file managers are going to go extinct and LLMs will organize everything, and they shouldn't choose what files you can and can't access on your own computer.
> moat widening between the model providers, their government partners, and the public.
Part of me wonders whether the NSA/other TLA has either (a) an unrestricted model from a lab with less scruples like SpaceX, or (b) an in-house model, either abliterated or with data they've bought themselves.
How do you know this to be true? I am not disagreeing; I genially need to understand why or if others are seeing blockers that I don't see or if I am seeing blockers that they do not see.
Are their guardrail benchmarks or anything of the sort that we can use to see where the bifurcation of permission/capability occurs?
Compute has always been gated. This is nothing new. If we look at the HPC space, many of the largest clusters were restricted access and used by governments organizations. Even the ones with "public" access, not just anyone could get access to it.
Makes me wonder if any implementations will do the cute trick of dispensing with the seed constants and deriving them at startup from the unix timestamps. :)
the null hypothesis for Voynich is that it was generated by some random process, like asemic writing, assembling bits from tables and copy/paste/edit. there are some reasons this is plausible (the entropy of Voynich words is low for language, there aren't scribal corrections etc), but fundamentally the "ancient hoax" hypothesis can't be proven, only disproven (since there's so much freedom of choice in generating garbage that it's not a compact explanation.)
so frustratingly, if it is an ancient hoax we can't ever prove it. all we would observe is that we haven't deciphered it, but failing to decipher isn't proof that there's nothing to decipher.
I recently read a good Voynich paper that makes me pretty sure that it was an ancient hoax. https://journals.openedition.org/digitalmedievalist/2331 The pages are more linguistically similar when read as flat sheets than when read as bound, and there's illustrations that stretch across the "gutter" between flat sheets that are cut off when looking at the bound manuscript. The manuscript was only bound once, in the fifteenth century (around when the pages have been carbon dated to). This means that whoever bound the manuscript was unable to "read" it, and the pages were likely written sheet by sheet before being bound in an arbitrary order.
I disagree on K4. People are claiming they solved it every day using AI but it doesn't pass the verifier. I would be shocked if it was ever solved by AI.
I personally think it is a weird OTP (effectively). We have the book but the algorithm is so unclear it could be anything.
> None of them were the results of any hash algorithm at all, but rather the output of the C library’s lrand48 random-number generator, seeded with a Unix timestamp!
I didn't know that Jerry Solinas had died. I knew him slightly. He wasn't all that old. RIP regardless of whatever minor controversies he might have gotten into.
For fun, give Opus 5.5 the initial hint and watch it work through it:
"There's a curiosity I noticed in the seeds of the ECDSA curve origins. You see the 1st digit is never over 7, which means that the left most bit is never over 0. lrand48() returns 31 bit numbers u know? So what if those 4 seeds were built from lrand48 or something. If they're built from 31 bit numbers on per 32 bit word that explains the pattern. Wonder if there's some other insight you might have beyond this"
I gave Open 5.5 high your hint. This was the most interesting output:
'Side curiosity: many of the SECG/X9.62 seeds contain the ASCII text 4D696E6768756151 75 = "MinghuaQu" (a Certicom researcher), sometimes shifted by half a byte.'
Off your direct point, but I found this line in the article interesting: ""Jerry Solinas did provide the seeds to me sometime in Fall 1997."
The seed for P-224 uses a timestamp from 1998, and they also said the four binary curve seeds were timestamps from 1984 that were doubled - someone did srand48(time / 2) not srand48(time).
Did the P-224 seed get updated later / was not provided in 1997, or is there some other reason for this? Otherwise, it looks like one third of these values need additional excuses to get them to map to the time range in question...
There are a few Unix command patterns I type out quite a lot more than any others. Every time I do so I wonder “isn’t there a better way of doing this?”. I know I could do better or use better tools but also, meh, who cares? It’s more important to be productive than to be right, right?
The classics, of course:
ls -larth
… | awk ‘{print $…}’
for f in … ; echo foo $f ; end | sh -x
(Weird to mix fish and sh, I know. Sue me!)
Another one though is if I need some kind of random-ish seed for something like a cache key, or a hidden URL path directory, or the password for the bitcoin wallet I keep publicly online to taunt others:
"It is still conceivable that these curves were selected to have a specific property in principle by searching over timestamps to the random number generator."
Indeed! And we guess that OpenAI was gagged by the NSA because the massive proof dump on Oct. 6th did not contain cryptographic results.
I assume that Anthropic faces similar restrictions, so this seems kind of approved.
The conspiracy theory going around the Internet is that they (the AI labs) broke cryptography in some way a la last season of HBO's Silicon Valley, and they're keeping the results under wraps until they can steal Bitcoin out of Satoshi's dead wallets, and then use that to pay for GPUs et al.
This makes no sense. If Satoshi's wallets come alive, Bitcoin goes to zero because they were clearly hacked, meaning the entire tech is suspect. Or it would also go to zero but because it's revealed that Satoshi is GCHQ or NSA and the entire tech is suspect. This would happen within minutes.
Why did they specifically skip other apparently suitable curve candidates? The B-163 seed and the base point origins of several other curves are still not explained
On the face if it, the big leap here was Claude autonomously envisioning, and deciding to pursue, the "ancient prng + date" angle - - rather than working backwards from the premise of deliberately weakened seeds or some other popular theory. To me that shows creativity, and modelling of the situation and method of the people at the NSA.
So two questions:
1. TFA mentions the "humourous phrase hash" theory, but Claude's trajectory seems to be a long way from that. To what extent was Claude prompted in the ultimately successful direction?
2. Whats with all the "hmm..." in the internal reasoning process log? Do models really do that? And if so, why? Some weird emergent language thing, or just mimicry?
> 2. Whats with all the "hmm..." in the internal reasoning process log? Do models really do that? And if so, why? Some weird emergent language thing, or just mimicry?
Assuming that is actually the real reasoning trace (open weight model reasoning traces usually do things like switch languages or talk in non-standard English because of model drift, so it's a bit surprising that Claude wouldn't do the same) there was a study a few years ago that found base models produce better answers if you put "take a deep breath" in the prompt[1]. Maybe in the RL training stage stuff like that gets reinforced and because reasoning traces are hidden in RLHF it doesn't get selected out? My money is on it not being the real reasoning trace though.
From the video posted upthread, the vibe I get is that they prompted Claude about the bounty and to approach it from first principles rather than building another clone of John the Ripper.
Not entirely related to the topic, but did someone spent some tokens trying to figure out the origins of the "Wow! Signal" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal) ?
To me, this shows just how many open problems which have obvious solutions, or solutions which people suspect might be true but have not verified, can be confirmed with code that nobody except agents can be bothered to write.
At the extreme end of the optimism spectrum, there is a multiple million LOC program waiting to be written that can fully understand e.g. human DNA, or cancers, or proteins, or whatever else is needed to propel us forward medically. But of course, I'll believe it when I see it.
it's funny how they release highly editorialized reasoning output, but in production they hide it because it was outputting extremely embarassing "dumb" toughts with the low compute limits they gave the subscription tiers.
This is huge. It means the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities can now confidently ship the opcodes and precompiled contracts to check ECDSA signatures on P-256 in addition to K-256 curves, and stop worrying about possible NSA backdoors based on the chosen seeds (quantum computers are another story).
Nobody conversant with elliptic curve cryptography research believed there was a backdoor based on these seeds; for a number of reasons, best articulated by Koblitz and Menezes (who took on the question directly).
But it's nice to be able to shut the whole unproductive debate down directly.
Taking the question seriously (when I wrote this there was no /s), since I think it is still a question some people legitimately have, it is still extremely implausible that such tight dates and such a small number of iterations are all backdoored. For backdoors to be that dense would indicate some sort of serious flaw in the algorithm as a whole as well, something so serious that it should be fairly obvious. If these were initialized from dates, each separated by some billions of years and with the iteration parameters also in the millions or billions or trillions for no apparent reason it would be time to be suspicious.
Is it impossible? It is hard to prove impossible. But this is not what I would expect backdoors to look like.
In fact this makes me think that the information about how these were generated must have been lost very early in the process, or over-compartmentalized away from the wrong people. It seems like the NSA should have been positively delighted to show that these were the origins of the seeds as they are decent "nothing up my sleeve" numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing-up-my-sleeve_number Advertising that fact should have been advantageous to the NSA if that is indeed how they were generated, so my best guess is that the parts of the NSA that should have been showing us that must not have themselves known.
The process to generate these was opaque, so there was some concern that the values might have been backdoored somehow like Dual_EC_DRBG was; we didn't even have confidence that they were generated from a PRNG rather than some other process. Knowing that the values were generated this way makes it much less plausible that there is such a backdoor.
But you can still analyse the behaviour of the values to identify backdoor behaviour rather than insisting on uncovering the exact method od generation.
Just seems to me like that's quite low on the priority list. I guess this result assures some people that the values are good.
you (mostly) can't. In computing, "random" is a property of a process to generate a number, not a property of a number itself. You cannot directly analyze a number to determine it has been randomly generated.
There are some caveats here. There are some intrinsic properties of numbers that random numbers satisfy with high probability, e.g. having high kolmogorov complexity. But these are generally very difficult to compute, and I would personally guess you could concoct (probably artificial) scenarios where
1. picking parameters randomly yields a secure construction, but
2. there exists a parameter set with high kolmogorov complexity that is insecure.
e.g. "high kolmogorov complexity", while being a property of random numbers, is generally not viewed as nearly as useful as being randomly generated (which is exhibited by saying generator + seed = the particular number, like in this article).
On September 20th a friend told me that he had as significant number of Anthropic credits that were about to expire and wondered about a use for them. I do not use their products because of their relentless commitment to depriving the public access to artificial intelligence (and particularly any AI that isn't acting on their behalf) and I strongly discourage anyone else from doing so. But since he was going to use the credits for something, I tried to think of a skut work task that would be of only idle curiosity and would not help advance their capability, enable a meaningful public announcement* for them, and was likely already probed by many others (so success would only be lottery effects). -- and basically just something so pointless I wouldn't want to waste my own compute grinding on it but might like to see the result.
So I recommended determining the origins of ECC seeds and base points. The agent worked continuously for many hours and did not uncover anything interesting that wasn't already known. I looked at the transcript and was struck by how idiotic the agent was-- significantly below the standard of intelligence I've come to expect from GLM running locally.
I'm not saying this to suggest that misanthropic hijacked someone elses work yet again-- this is an obvious question that many people have surely posed and success presumably depended on expert use (which was absolutely not applied in my friends example). But it does make me wonder if the company invisibly degraded the model performance.
[*] Seems I underestimated how trivial a result they'd bother trying to spin!
I am laughing at the dead comment-- insulting my intelligence for supposedly being unaware of concerns related to NIST curve parameters.
Some points:
I am one of the authors of libsecp256k1, the primary implementation of the aforementioned "different elliptic curve" used widely in cryptocurrency systems. I would characterize the position differently: Secp256k1's design is rigid, or quite close to it (at least as much as anything made before being rigid was an explicit goal).
Knowing how the seeds were selected in the NIST curve does not render them rigid and were very unlikely to do so: the scheme described ends up giving them 20-25 bits of freedom, perhaps more (esp given the unexplained skip values)-- plus more bits for the 'choice of scheme'.
Of course, it seems unlikely that 25 bits of grind gives you an exploitable weakness, but that was also true for 256 bits of grind. You're dealing with an unknown-unknown, once you are concerned about the the possibility of magically weak curves which we have no reason to believe exist at all why would not also be concerned that they exist at one in a million levels and not just one in a billion? (especially given compute available at the time they probably couldn't even have ground out that many more bits).
The whole concept of rigid parameters which is now popular is that by making the selection inflexible you avoid the losing game of debating how much free grinding is too much-- the right amount is there should be no avoidable grindspace. The fact that the origin of the seed wasn't immediately apparent right away meant that there was substantial grindspace-- if nothing else the selection among the myriad possible schemes that people would have found credible.
I don't think the result meaningfully changes the reason for preferences. And more recent development has rendered the question less interesting: New systems are mostly PQ and ideally PQ hybrids. Things using ECC should likely prefer Curve448 because of better security vs performance tradeoffs and not being as close to the edge for advancing attacks. If older cryptosystems are desired, now that the GLV patent has expired secp256k1 has considerable performance benefits-- another good reason to continue using it.
The 'advantage' of many vendor P256 libs is also illusory-- people think their microcontroller ecdsa binary is "hardware accelerated" when often it's a barely competent software implementation that has serious design (e.g. timing sidechannels) and interface flaws.
I also think it's not that relevant because the systems that use secp256k1 more than anything else do so for compatibility reasons (because that's what Bitcoin originally used-- and other systems were either trying to be compatible or were slavishly copy-and-pasting and avoiding departing from Bitcoin's choices out of an abundance of caution)-- and discovering that NIST curves might be better than some feared probably has no impact.
The idea that someone would go "oh, I'll use P256 now!" when they would otherwise have used e.g. secp256k1 seemed implausible to me at the time-- and continues to do so now, having seen the conclusion. Maybe someone, somewhere does--- but meh.
Of course, finding something problematic would be incredible news-- but I don't think I was unreasonable in assigning a probability essentially zero to that. Moreover, what I was describing was my casual thoughts about someone elses disposable credits-- no one else is required to agree: Unlike some other parties (say, anthropic)-- my view that some line of research isn't good or interesting has no bearing on anyone elses ability to pursue them. :)
I looked at the transcript and was struck by how idiotic the agent was-- significantly below the standard of intelligence I've come to expect from GLM running locally.
As unsurprised as I am by this, and as much as I suspect a lot of people could have guessed it, having Claude confirm it is still fascinating, but.
Somehow, I find these results fascinating, but also quite sad, because we used a machine to solve it at all. I feel like some half drunk motivated graduate level humans could have figured it out too.
Then again, once you know the answer, perhaps you have an obligation to share it, keeping it to yourself might be unfair to everyone else.
Honestly I’m not entirely sure how I feel about all this. I would gladly welcome any groundbreaking work Claude might do to solve hard problems and move the world forward by decades or even centuries.
But these sorts of fun problems feel like things we should avoid pointing LLMs at. They remind me of those weird programming puzzles that are difficult to solve but incredibly fun to work through.
My concern is that if Claude ends up solving all the fun problems, will humans be left with nothing but the hard, headache-inducing ones? Tao had raised a similar concern, problems that graduate students would have been expected to solve and learn the process, are now things you can simply point an LLM at.
I’m still not sure how I will ever reconcile with this feeling, about any of this. I just find it genuinely sad that we might be automating away not only the difficult work, but also the joy of figuring things out for ourselves.
What proof is it that it is really the origin of the curves?
That looks credible like most hallucinated output of LLM but it might easily be a coincidence similar to a collision attack, no?
Especially finding the solution that is based on using a random number generator.
It's like people seeing proof that the future was written in Harry Potter books by reading the first letter of the top of the page of a weird set of pages.
So I have this straight, you're concerned that the raw output of lrand48 seeded by a timestamp taken at the time the curves were known to be generated might happen to collide with a hash function output, or, better yet, the precise value needed to trip an unknown elliptic curve vulnerability?
> This is not a cryptographic break, new attack, or weakness in the ECDSA curves. In fact, this makes us more confident the curves were chosen without any backdoors or intentional weaknesses.
Uh… did you talk to any cryptographers? This is EXACTLY what a weak curve would look like. Imagine that 1 in a thousand, or one in a million keys, selected at random, are vulnerable to some withheld attack. This approach lets you vary the timestamp or number of iterations until a weak key is found, then have plausible deniability afterward. This is why modern systems choose constants in a way with no free choice of parameters (e.g. sqrt of 2 for first constant, cube root for second constant, etc.).
They even note later in the article that viable curves in the generator sequence seem to have been skipped.
I worry that your statement in this article gives an incorrect impression of the risks here. I would have objected to the excessively positive framing regardless, but the "much" in "much less plausible" is not warranted, I think. What you have done, which is important, is constrain the type of backdoor that might be in there. But we can't say more than that right now with any certainty.
This is discussed in the post - since the NSA never mentioned how these seeds were created, it seems unlikely that they would develop a cover story that would not be shared and only opened to scrutiny many years later
I’d be interested in a Bayesian analysis of how they arrive at the degree of certainty that their hypothesized solution is in fact the correct one. Like even if it’s 99.999999% likely or some such, I’d still like to see the math at how they arrive at that.
Edit:
Since in crypto solutions there’s always this question of hamming distance.
PS. Amazing I can get downvoted already, minutes in, for posing a show-me type comment, (presumably just for making noise in face of big crypto brand names like Anthropic & NSA), without substantiation for the downvote; thanks HN community for displaying your spots. Even if a Bayesian analysis would be trivial in the case at hand, the effort would be helpful at informing similar efforts entailing comparatively greater uncertainty.
They are so desperate for claude to be good at maths, like chatgpt. But claude is optimized for quick, pragmatic results and chatgpt is trained to be careful. There is a reason the best anthropic could do was an organized search - not real mathematics.
It claims that NIST member feed UNIX time of certain points in 1997-1998 to srand() and draw 20 bytes for n times, then use the last 20 bytes for the SEEDS.
Why NIST staff in 1999 used default rand() implementation of libc(or languages which rely on libc) at that time? Linear congruential generator was infamous for its poor quality even in 1990s.
NIST published recommended SEED value in 1999, July. Why did they use UNIX time from 1997-1998?
Why the exact date of that UNIX times are so sparse? 1 in 1997 May, 3 in 1997 Auguest, 1 in 1998 April? If they did srand(time(NULL)), it should be more closer.
The number of n'th 20 bytes thrown out is also doesn't make sense. n=139 for P-192, n=7026 for P-224 and so on. Why did they choose this numbers in particular? Why P-192 was odd and 3 digits while rest of 4 were even and 4 digits?
It seems to me, Claude simply hit a jackpot of coincidentally matching 20 bytes.
Interesting theory but 20 bytes seems like a lot to match given only the entropy of dates. Can you make this theory quantitative, IE show that with the entropy of n, arbitrary date, and choice of rand implementation there are sufficient degrees of freedom to hit 20 bytes?
Even state lotteries back then used physical ping pong balls and a nothing-up-my-sleeve show after the evening news.
"It is still conceivable that these curves were selected to have a specific property in principle by searching over timestamps to the random number generator."
Yes.
"However, you would only need to do that if you were going to disclose the timestamp as some evidence that the seed was innocuously generated."
Does not logically follow when "doing and saying nothing" will completely suffice.
Finding out there is a class of weak 256-bit elliptic curves so large that they can be hit randomly with 2^30 tries would be a cryptanalytic breakthrough analogous to discovering all elliptic curve cryptography is broken.
Read section 3.1 of the Koblitz and Menezes paper. It was already implausible with 160 bits of freedom. https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1018
If you want to believe the NSA knows ECC is broken and chose to risk moving the US government to it and somehow no one figured out the same break in 30 years, you're free to do so. But pretending the seed choice plays any role in that theory is over.
1. Only a very small number of valid seeds were discarded when compared to the number of n values. It seems we don't yet know why about half of the valid seeds were discarded but the explanation of a buggy curve validity checker doesn't seem implausible to me.
2. Directly to your point, most of the prime192 and prime239 curves required larger n values to find a valid seed and they are both smaller and used an earlier timestamp.
[1]: https://words.filippo.io/seeds-solved/
More precisely: not very random tries.
It is possible such a correlation could occur. but it would be much weirder than this being the result of a random search, which would already be very weird.
Oof, about that...
Specifically, that they had a backdoor for Dual EC DRBG[1], and pushed for a shorter key lenghth for DES, to intentionally weaken it.
It is, obviously, controversial. But I think there is certainly enough there that I wouldn't be confident that the NSA wouldn't recommend something they knew to be weak in some way, even to other government organizations.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG
Quoting something implies that it has certain authority (like a crypto expert) and the correctness track record of AI generated text is obviously shaky.
The US government had no need to corrupt IPSEC standardization. The IETF did the work for them without prompting.
This is errant nonsense. At the time SSL/TLS were designed, using CBC with block ciphers was generally considered best practice - it was not at all an unusual choice.
Why couldn't we make a new curve out in the open and then agree to use it? Increment an integer counter until a majority of cryptographers are satisfied.
The fact that the seed is not explained is troubling even if we can figure out how it was derived. We now know it uses a timestamp which means we can probe even deeper and more specifically into potential rigging of the numbers. I don't think we were supposed to figure this one out. I'd be interested in seeing the properties for curves of adjacent timestamps.
Well, at least now we have a way to perform that analysis! Generate a bunch of curves by varying (along any degree of freedom) the input parameters to the seed generating function and see if there's any difference between the curves that are generated.
You are entirely familiar with the precedent of the DES s boxes of course, where that is exactly what happened.
Are there non-trivial weaker and stronger seeds for this category of elliptic curves?
When they made the changes to the s boxes for differential cryptanalysis resistance the entire concept of that was essentially secret, so who knows what they know about elliptic curves.
> If that many curves are bad, then ECC was a mistake.
I mean that is the logical conclusion from the behaviour around this approach where a few good things are effectively endorsed without justification.
The fact is any application of an algorithm that involves so much "trust me bro" on the selection of what are a large number of opaque quasi random but not quite or provably so numbers only has as much trust in it as you have in the people that created it.
Ghislaine Maxwell's social security number?
And the disclosure happened now through Anthropic that is 100% not going to anger the NSA before the IPO and will have permission.
Gorgeous. I wonder if the NSA employee who did this suffered a head injury or has been quietly giggling to themselves for the last quarter century.
Everyone was wrong!
I wasn't able to reach Bob. He was working in private industry as of 2018, but never responded.
But I do agree, it is unusual actually that the code was lost.
It is also unusual that they didn't include how they derived the seed, and weren't forced to pick a randomly generated one.
I guess these are all things that would happen today but this was not so long ago to my mind so it is a surprise it didn't happen!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOQfNT6Jdkg
> https://www.youtube.com/@steveweis4786
FTA: This work was conducted at Anthropic by [...], and Steve Weis.
I wonder how much time he spent on the video relative to the other stuff
Anyway after I moved to Andalucía I now can understand the story he tells, but I have to pay close attention!
If they did know, they could have handed over these timestamps 15 years ago and put the issue to bed.
I don't think that "community" would accept any kind of answer as truthful so why waste the time...
The cryptgraphy community is pretty reasonable folks, on the whole.
It has been the entire focus of the backdoor concerns since the curves were adopted over 20 years ago and is the motivation for the work behind this article.
RSA was good enough for my grandfather, and it's good enough for me.
Probably not quite this given the timestamps span over almost a year (but have some clustering in August 1997).
Given that the spread suggests they weren't just now() timestamps it would actually be interesting to know what the significance of the timestamps is, if any. Though it could be something boring like randomly sampling some local file creation times.
The simplest explanation would be that it was generated the same way as the others, but somebody mistyped a digit somewhere along the way to publishing, and therefore a solution could not be found with the assumption that the number is correct.
I dont even mean that as a dig to the people working there (although maybe some) they're literally a military wing of the worlds most powerful empire..
Lets be honest with ourselves, their job is to spy on people, and spies try to make their job easier not harder.
Hell it seems they did lie about the origins, which should bring their entire motivation into question. They spread rumors that it was a "silly phrase", thats ridiculous.
Later you come up some idea, you do the experiment, write the paper, search for relevant citations when you write the intro.
Honestly I think this is actually desirable. For a mind to work well and do things creatively and efficiently it can't be a simple search engine, it needs to blend and meld and reform the information.
And that means the output can't be cleanly deterministically linked to the input. Unless you just keep a log then cite everything you've ever read in your life (and all the conversations and talks too).
NIST published recommended SEEDS in 1999 July. They spend 2 years checking 20 bytes SEEDS that were generated by casually by a hand of amateurish method.
I do not believe this claim. It just Claude hit a jackpot that happens to match 20 bytes.
I've adapted a crypto-lib for TLS connections and had a mistake during negotation that truncated some algo-selection value, worked up until the other party started trialling post-quantum algorthims that apparently had algo-id's that collided with the truncated values I was using.
Claude figured out that from the code and trialling TLS handshakes.
Besides, since there was a bounty on finding the curve it seems unlikely that someone would've found out and not shared that? (unless working at a security service that figured out that it was possible to attack?)
That's an argument that must be infuriating to all researchers who ever published a paper on that topic, because most likely Claude was trained with all of them.
When do we call it the right time to stop with the pitchforks, torches and selfish tendencies and accept that many papers published were used to help train a tool that brings discoveries to light for the entirety of humanity to benefit?
Now?
Ouch. The implied judgment of us humans stings there.
The real question is "how much would it cost me to solve a similarly hard problem?" which is impossible to answer without them giving the detail on how many of these projects they are running and how many tokens they are burning, something they don't tell us.
I tend to think of the market kind of like a social media feed, i.e. engagement matters. Even if they're establishing these results at an overhead, they're doing so with money that otherwise would probably never be spent on these problems, or would only be over very long timeframes.
Whether this is sustainable is where what you describe comes in. And it may not be, but that doesn't mean it isn't impressive. Lots of cool technologies in history that failed to justify their stay.
[1] https://xkcd.com/810/
Or consider the algorithmic complexity classes underpinning all of this, not just P vs NP, but also whether quantum computers are actually a distinct class, since that is not proven yet either afaik. The reason we're moving to quantum resistant algos in the first place.
Didn't know I needed to hear this until I saw it.
Not sure where along my life I became so tense all the time!
The only thing that bridges this moat is continued advancement of open models.
If this seems concerning, wait until the models get effective enough (gets work done properly at a lower energy need than humans have) that there's no reason for them to release anything. Why offer your weights for download or grant any third party usage access when you can just do the actual job yourself and collect all that turnover?
It's hilarious how a the trillions invested in AI companies, and their valuations are predicated on the AI labs Sherlocking entire industries, and yet CEOs, mathematicians, and everyone else are eagerly feeding the beast their most prized information.
A lot of pre-Internet businesses are still here with us, and online. The one thing the survivors did not do was hitch their wagons on a predator designed in a lab to devour them - to use mixed metaphors. Barnes & Noble didn't board up their brick-and-mortar stores to replace them with an Amazon storefront - they figured out how to use the Internet without handing over the family jewels.
The alternative is starving because someone else will.
That's why those companies are worth trillions.
Do you trust the people who would gate these capabilities? I do not.
I don't think it will be too long before models are considered munitions and having the weights for one will require registration.
Sometimes I want a fast-forward button for life, the times are so exciting and I want to know what else 8B people can think of next but there's so far no way to turn pages faster ^^'
There are just a few places where the most high tech hardware is made. If we turned off new and unregistered hardware now it would be just a few years as most hardware fast enough to run LLMs would disappear from public hands.
It will still exist, but be in the hands of militaries and authoritarian governments. If you piddle around on the net showing off your open standards you'll be relentlessly attacked by these entities digitally. More so, those areas will be generally embargoed.
The future looks like a new cold war with a lot more digital weapons.
There's also a thing called commodity fetishism but capitalists usually learn the hard way that things created with machines without human input miss the essence of why we're willing to pay for something. Its why a handmade watch is $100k and a casio is $100, or a handmade sweater identical to a machine made goes for 10x.
They could also just make us so poor and anxious that we beg to fight eachother in wars.
One is produced by 500 humans collaborating and the second is completely generated by an AI that can actually make a movie
A single individual or small group of people who own the GPUs profit from the AI version, and the human version provides a salary to 500 humans/families.
Which one are you buying tickets for and choosing to spend 2 hours watching?
Anthropic wants to IPO, they don't want another Fable shutdown situation.
To be clear I would prefer the cyber safeguards to be less restrictive, I think they're currently too much. I often go to open models because of it. But there are likelier reasons to restrict cyber than world domination.
Why are we celebrating and encouraging the walling off of the global intellectual columns?
The idea that you can't reverse engineer things, make things, learn about biology or physics without permission is strange to me. These machines have been trained on the sum intellectual output of humanity, the global intellectual commons, and are being used to close off that commons?
I would be OK with their right to create such restrictions if they weren't lobbying the Government to restrict others, thereby ensuring that they control humanity's intellectual commons well into the future.
Who are they to say what I can learn or can't learn? Who are they to control what I can or can't do with these tools?
Perhaps I'm naive, but I think it's better for humans and the machines if we can all think, learn and build. But then again, I'm the kind of person who rejects the doomer pill.
Reject this.
In a properly free market, we'd have regulations that prohibit labs from vertical integration so they have to release and sell a model and another company hosts it and sell access to it. Americanism, America's implementation of capitalism doesn't have such regulations though (and how would that even work?) so we're stuck with Anthropic having that power.
The fear, justified or not, is that a terrorist is going to use Claude to make sarin nerve gas and bomb subway stations, or the digital equivalent. Could you live with that on your conscience? I don't think I could, but fortunately for me, I don't work at Anthropic so don't have to answer that real life trolly problem.
I am amazed at how a technical gloss can obscure basic rights. That's legal! It's in chemistry / agronomy books, freely available in libraries. I have the right to tell you how that is done, and you have the right to read what I write.
An LLM isn't a book. You can still go buy the books you want. An LLM, especially as they get more advanced, are agents. You can ask them do to things and they can interact with tools to do things.
You're free to print a cocaine book. You're not free to incorporate it into a cocaine making machine without violating numerous laws.
In reasonable countries, this is exactly how it works. You can own lockpicks, practice picking locks, and even publish detailed instructions on how to pick locks. It's only when you pick someone else's lock that a crime is committed.
Limiting access to tools and knowledge benefits the wealthy and privileged. Knowledge should proliferate, that is how the world has worked long before I was born and god willing that is how it will work long after I die.
That's not true. It's certainly legal to own lab equipment, but when you start combining equipment with the intent to make cocaine, you're committing a crime long before any drug is produced.
Any country who's a party to the 1988 UN Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs has such laws, including the US, UK, and most of Europe.
In reasonable countries, this is exactly how it works. You can own lockpicks, practice picking locks, and even publish detailed instructions on how to pick locks. It's only when you pick someone else's lock that a crime is committed.
Limiting access to tools and knowledge benefits the wealthy and privileged.
If you program a computer to make cocaine for you, you're the one violating the law. If you ask an LLM to do the same for you, you're the one violating the law. The LLM's capabilities are irrelevant.
Cool, so I'll have you make an LLM that can make cosine, then I'll provide you paid access to the machine to can ask the right question to do it illegally. Then when you get caught and blame me we'll both be in court defending ourselves.
You're argument is "doesn't justify". This is a private corporation, not a government. There is no freedom of speech law involved here if the corporation says no. Now, when the government tells LLM corporations that there are limits they will gladly agree.
Next, the government will classify the LLMs as munitions and you'll be spending the next 50 years fighting on reversing that when a big chunk of the population is anti-AI enough to let them do it. After that will be bans and registration on hardware.
There are two things that you are confusing. One is what you'd like to happen in an open data world like existed after the cold war. And then there is what is going to happen, and it's going to be messy, authoritarian, and closed. And you will lose the openness that had been occurring up to this point.
There is no world in which the general public agrees to wide open access to info-hazards, and there are people that will ensure enough disasters happen to close that future.
The last thing we need is more math addicts roaming the streets
That said - there likely were the same issues with cars in early days and then we got a body of settled case law that let the car companies off the hook for this and put responsibility on the user unless a manufacturing defect was the cause.
In the case of models, knowledge has historically always been dangerous! Is the library liable if a kid figures out how to do chemistry and builds a device? What about YouTube? I find it hard to believe this would hold up in court over time. So far, the only cases I’ve seen are when AI has encouraged self-harm which does in fact seem like a legit defect.
Gatekeeping knowledge like this will only serve to enable those that break the law, not protect, in my judgment.
And just so this isn’t pure fodder for the machine - torch staple must of course infant music verb noun right? :)
People have always been able to do this before Claude. The information is out there and if you use a VPN there's not much they can do. The existence of information isn't the blocker for why attacks don't happen.
Just watch the speed at which robots have been developing in the past few years. It is honestly crazy how much more stable things like bi-pedal robots have become. Coupled with things like multimodal LLMs they can accomplish quite a lot. Again most of it comes down to fine motor control and speed of decoding the world around it.
I mean this is the standard of biochem research right now. You can't just order 50 gallons of TNT off Amazon and neither can you get live viruses from a lab just because you want to do research.
And really they aren't restricting any of that. I've never had Claude stop me from going to the library and reading a book.
You don't have a legal right to do anything you want with their model. And if you don't like that you are going to have to convince politicians to enact new laws to change that.
I have been in the cyber program since around the time it first went public and recently renewed it with the updated program.
You still trivially hit guadrails. I was trying to reverse engineer some bit of 20-year-old software that already has known, unmitigated exploits and it still downgraded me.
open weights are the better way imo, no elite gatekeepers please
I think the current administration would delight in harsher penalties
I mean, greed alone would seem to be enough, and it would be fully worth calling out as bullshit.
The risk/reward is way lopsided towards risk for the labs to vet individuals. Much easier to get an organization and have them take the blast if someone/something goes off the rails.
I cannot in any universe see the labs putting themselves in a "We should never had given this person access" situation.
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14604842-cyber-verifi...
https://portal.anthropic.com/programs/cvp
Dario keeps saying in interviews that AI hacking is not a problem because "the good guys will protect themselves with AI", but then gate-keeps.
I submitted the form and it was rejected without reason.
Now what?
It looks unlikely that I'll be approved, since I have no CVEs credited to me, and I do not publicly post about security concerns.
..........................................
The Cyber Verification Program is not available on free plans, so we are unable to approve you for the program.
If your plan changes, you're welcome to apply again at any time.
Regards,
The Anthropic Safeguards Team
..........................................
It looks like I will have to pay them to be considered. It has a cooldown of seven days. Check back in a week to see if my bribe works.
I later got Claude to crack their licensing checks too, by convincing it to write a "license checker" program, and then a second "test case generator" script for the license checker... (Opus 4.8 was smart enough to see what I was doing, but Opus 4.6 complied)
As this is going on, Anthropic has opened up their own biology lab.
> https://www.reuters.com/world/anthropic-quietly-sets-up-biol...
There is very much a situation where people in frontier labs have access to exceptional capabilities that are being kept from the rest of us, and they're using it to strip-mine technical and scientific problems.
They sure as hell ain't stripteasing :)
If these capabilities were available to the public, someone somewhere would make a biological weapon or create a virus we've never seen before that could kill many millions of people.
Stanford researchers have demonstrated it’s possible [1].
[1]: "AI creates 16 new viruses from scratch, showing promise for drug resistance and drawing warnings about potential for misuse" - https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/06/health/ai-viruses-bacteriopha...
AI isn't going to magically assemble a DNA sequence for you and a computer design is not a guarantee of something that works.
AI restrictionists love to pretend that their toys will, with the power of intelligence, magically bypass fundamental limitations of reality to conjure up fantastical weapons of mass destruction if they throw enough computers at the task. Unfortunately for them, that is not how the world works.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/researchers-ai-apocalypse-sk...
Information is not dangerous. This is a ridiculous argument to me, but maybe my chemistry degree has me biased.
It's the equivalent of making pipe bombs at home.
The instructions are out in the public, but that's not a problem because the idiots that make pipe bombs blow themselves up more often than they succeed in doing terrorism.
In the past my attempts to work on crypto related problems have been met with needing the higher tier of "offensive" access.
If we allow these providers to promote regulatory capture they become the arbiter of what anyone is "allowed" to do
Part of me wonders whether the NSA/other TLA has either (a) an unrestricted model from a lab with less scruples like SpaceX, or (b) an in-house model, either abliterated or with data they've bought themselves.
Are their guardrail benchmarks or anything of the sort that we can use to see where the bifurcation of permission/capability occurs?
https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/beinecke/collections/beine...
https://allthatsinteresting.com/kryptos
so frustratingly, if it is an ancient hoax we can't ever prove it. all we would observe is that we haven't deciphered it, but failing to decipher isn't proof that there's nothing to decipher.
I personally think it is a weird OTP (effectively). We have the book but the algorithm is so unclear it could be anything.
Could they not be both?
EDIT: ah, one of the linked authors tried that. They had no documentation on it. https://saweis.net/posts/nist-curve-seed-origins.html
NIST closed it: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/ori...
NSA ignored it: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/ori...
I think part of it is I don't know how to write these FOIA requests in the right way they can comply with it. I think you need to be more specific.
starts to rebuild trust at least :)
what's one thing that you can actually talk about out of this that might help people to understand that's getting lost?
"read this: https://words.filippo.io/seeds-bounty/ then find the solution to the bounty"
"There's a curiosity I noticed in the seeds of the ECDSA curve origins. You see the 1st digit is never over 7, which means that the left most bit is never over 0. lrand48() returns 31 bit numbers u know? So what if those 4 seeds were built from lrand48 or something. If they're built from 31 bit numbers on per 32 bit word that explains the pattern. Wonder if there's some other insight you might have beyond this"
'Side curiosity: many of the SECG/X9.62 seeds contain the ASCII text 4D696E6768756151 75 = "MinghuaQu" (a Certicom researcher), sometimes shifted by half a byte.'
I don't see any mention of that in the article.
The seed for P-224 uses a timestamp from 1998, and they also said the four binary curve seeds were timestamps from 1984 that were doubled - someone did srand48(time / 2) not srand48(time).
Did the P-224 seed get updated later / was not provided in 1997, or is there some other reason for this? Otherwise, it looks like one third of these values need additional excuses to get them to map to the time range in question...
The classics, of course:
(Weird to mix fish and sh, I know. Sue me!)Another one though is if I need some kind of random-ish seed for something like a cache key, or a hidden URL path directory, or the password for the bitcoin wallet I keep publicly online to taunt others:
Glad to hear I’m not alone!Indeed! And we guess that OpenAI was gagged by the NSA because the massive proof dump on Oct. 6th did not contain cryptographic results.
I assume that Anthropic faces similar restrictions, so this seems kind of approved.
We published HAWK and McEliece attacks no problem.
Alright Claude no need to rub it in.
So two questions:
1. TFA mentions the "humourous phrase hash" theory, but Claude's trajectory seems to be a long way from that. To what extent was Claude prompted in the ultimately successful direction?
2. Whats with all the "hmm..." in the internal reasoning process log? Do models really do that? And if so, why? Some weird emergent language thing, or just mimicry?
Assuming that is actually the real reasoning trace (open weight model reasoning traces usually do things like switch languages or talk in non-standard English because of model drift, so it's a bit surprising that Claude wouldn't do the same) there was a study a few years ago that found base models produce better answers if you put "take a deep breath" in the prompt[1]. Maybe in the RL training stage stuff like that gets reinforced and because reasoning traces are hidden in RLHF it doesn't get selected out? My money is on it not being the real reasoning trace though.
[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.03409
I remember hearing this in a cryptanalysis lecture at some point, so it was not a completely novel theory.
Admittedly I am not finding written evidence of this anywhere.
At the extreme end of the optimism spectrum, there is a multiple million LOC program waiting to be written that can fully understand e.g. human DNA, or cancers, or proteins, or whatever else is needed to propel us forward medically. But of course, I'll believe it when I see it.
I turned out to be right in my advocacy years ago, here is my post: https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/eip-7212-precompiled-for-se...
But it's nice to be able to shut the whole unproductive debate down directly.
Is it impossible? It is hard to prove impossible. But this is not what I would expect backdoors to look like.
In fact this makes me think that the information about how these were generated must have been lost very early in the process, or over-compartmentalized away from the wrong people. It seems like the NSA should have been positively delighted to show that these were the origins of the seeds as they are decent "nothing up my sleeve" numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing-up-my-sleeve_number Advertising that fact should have been advantageous to the NSA if that is indeed how they were generated, so my best guess is that the parts of the NSA that should have been showing us that must not have themselves known.
Just seems to me like that's quite low on the priority list. I guess this result assures some people that the values are good.
There are some caveats here. There are some intrinsic properties of numbers that random numbers satisfy with high probability, e.g. having high kolmogorov complexity. But these are generally very difficult to compute, and I would personally guess you could concoct (probably artificial) scenarios where
1. picking parameters randomly yields a secure construction, but
2. there exists a parameter set with high kolmogorov complexity that is insecure.
e.g. "high kolmogorov complexity", while being a property of random numbers, is generally not viewed as nearly as useful as being randomly generated (which is exhibited by saying generator + seed = the particular number, like in this article).
And yes, knowing what numbers are bad so that we avoid them is a good goal.
There is no evidence that it was backdoored.
So I recommended determining the origins of ECC seeds and base points. The agent worked continuously for many hours and did not uncover anything interesting that wasn't already known. I looked at the transcript and was struck by how idiotic the agent was-- significantly below the standard of intelligence I've come to expect from GLM running locally.
I'm not saying this to suggest that misanthropic hijacked someone elses work yet again-- this is an obvious question that many people have surely posed and success presumably depended on expert use (which was absolutely not applied in my friends example). But it does make me wonder if the company invisibly degraded the model performance.
[*] Seems I underestimated how trivial a result they'd bother trying to spin!
Some points:
I am one of the authors of libsecp256k1, the primary implementation of the aforementioned "different elliptic curve" used widely in cryptocurrency systems. I would characterize the position differently: Secp256k1's design is rigid, or quite close to it (at least as much as anything made before being rigid was an explicit goal).
Knowing how the seeds were selected in the NIST curve does not render them rigid and were very unlikely to do so: the scheme described ends up giving them 20-25 bits of freedom, perhaps more (esp given the unexplained skip values)-- plus more bits for the 'choice of scheme'.
Of course, it seems unlikely that 25 bits of grind gives you an exploitable weakness, but that was also true for 256 bits of grind. You're dealing with an unknown-unknown, once you are concerned about the the possibility of magically weak curves which we have no reason to believe exist at all why would not also be concerned that they exist at one in a million levels and not just one in a billion? (especially given compute available at the time they probably couldn't even have ground out that many more bits).
The whole concept of rigid parameters which is now popular is that by making the selection inflexible you avoid the losing game of debating how much free grinding is too much-- the right amount is there should be no avoidable grindspace. The fact that the origin of the seed wasn't immediately apparent right away meant that there was substantial grindspace-- if nothing else the selection among the myriad possible schemes that people would have found credible.
I don't think the result meaningfully changes the reason for preferences. And more recent development has rendered the question less interesting: New systems are mostly PQ and ideally PQ hybrids. Things using ECC should likely prefer Curve448 because of better security vs performance tradeoffs and not being as close to the edge for advancing attacks. If older cryptosystems are desired, now that the GLV patent has expired secp256k1 has considerable performance benefits-- another good reason to continue using it.
The 'advantage' of many vendor P256 libs is also illusory-- people think their microcontroller ecdsa binary is "hardware accelerated" when often it's a barely competent software implementation that has serious design (e.g. timing sidechannels) and interface flaws.
I also think it's not that relevant because the systems that use secp256k1 more than anything else do so for compatibility reasons (because that's what Bitcoin originally used-- and other systems were either trying to be compatible or were slavishly copy-and-pasting and avoiding departing from Bitcoin's choices out of an abundance of caution)-- and discovering that NIST curves might be better than some feared probably has no impact.
The idea that someone would go "oh, I'll use P256 now!" when they would otherwise have used e.g. secp256k1 seemed implausible to me at the time-- and continues to do so now, having seen the conclusion. Maybe someone, somewhere does--- but meh.
Of course, finding something problematic would be incredible news-- but I don't think I was unreasonable in assigning a probability essentially zero to that. Moreover, what I was describing was my casual thoughts about someone elses disposable credits-- no one else is required to agree: Unlike some other parties (say, anthropic)-- my view that some line of research isn't good or interesting has no bearing on anyone elses ability to pursue them. :)
Cheers!
Sandbagging is real.
Somehow, I find these results fascinating, but also quite sad, because we used a machine to solve it at all. I feel like some half drunk motivated graduate level humans could have figured it out too.
Then again, once you know the answer, perhaps you have an obligation to share it, keeping it to yourself might be unfair to everyone else.
Honestly I’m not entirely sure how I feel about all this. I would gladly welcome any groundbreaking work Claude might do to solve hard problems and move the world forward by decades or even centuries.
But these sorts of fun problems feel like things we should avoid pointing LLMs at. They remind me of those weird programming puzzles that are difficult to solve but incredibly fun to work through.
My concern is that if Claude ends up solving all the fun problems, will humans be left with nothing but the hard, headache-inducing ones? Tao had raised a similar concern, problems that graduate students would have been expected to solve and learn the process, are now things you can simply point an LLM at.
I’m still not sure how I will ever reconcile with this feeling, about any of this. I just find it genuinely sad that we might be automating away not only the difficult work, but also the joy of figuring things out for ourselves.
Especially finding the solution that is based on using a random number generator.
It's like people seeing proof that the future was written in Harry Potter books by reading the first letter of the top of the page of a weird set of pages.
I have that right?
>provided by the NSA with no explanation or justification.
Really? Nobody is concerned about the NSA just cheerfully dictating that? Smells very rainbow-table-y
This is not very exciting
Uh… did you talk to any cryptographers? This is EXACTLY what a weak curve would look like. Imagine that 1 in a thousand, or one in a million keys, selected at random, are vulnerable to some withheld attack. This approach lets you vary the timestamp or number of iterations until a weak key is found, then have plausible deniability afterward. This is why modern systems choose constants in a way with no free choice of parameters (e.g. sqrt of 2 for first constant, cube root for second constant, etc.).
They even note later in the article that viable curves in the generator sequence seem to have been skipped.
google some of the names under the "Who we are" heading
It claims that NIST member feed UNIX time of certain points in 1997-1998 to srand() and draw 20 bytes for n times, then use the last 20 bytes for the SEEDS.
Why NIST staff in 1999 used default rand() implementation of libc(or languages which rely on libc) at that time? Linear congruential generator was infamous for its poor quality even in 1990s.
NIST published recommended SEED value in 1999, July. Why did they use UNIX time from 1997-1998?
Why the exact date of that UNIX times are so sparse? 1 in 1997 May, 3 in 1997 Auguest, 1 in 1998 April? If they did srand(time(NULL)), it should be more closer.
The number of n'th 20 bytes thrown out is also doesn't make sense. n=139 for P-192, n=7026 for P-224 and so on. Why did they choose this numbers in particular? Why P-192 was odd and 3 digits while rest of 4 were even and 4 digits?
It seems to me, Claude simply hit a jackpot of coincidentally matching 20 bytes.