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
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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 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.
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.
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.
>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?
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? :)
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.
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)
> 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.
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!
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.
It looks like I will have to pay them to be considered, and even so, 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.
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.
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.
> [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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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
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<<
“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.
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!
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.
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) ?
> 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!
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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. :)
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?)
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).
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?
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.
> 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.
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
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 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".
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!
sweis | 3 hours ago
217 | 3 hours ago
bayarearefugee | 3 hours ago
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.
SturgeonsLaw | 28 minutes ago
tptacek | 3 hours ago
nickysielicki | 2 hours ago
tptacek | 2 hours ago
thoughtpeddler | 37 minutes ago
SturgeonsLaw | 25 minutes ago
thoughtpeddler | 23 minutes ago
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs | 2 hours ago
I don't think that "community" would accept any kind of answer as truthful so why waste the time...
nickysielicki | 2 hours ago
valleyer | an hour ago
sweis | 2 hours ago
If they did know, they could have handed over these timestamps 15 years ago and put the issue to bed.
yrjrjjrjjtjjr | 2 hours ago
EGreg | 3 hours ago
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...
tptacek | 3 hours ago
But it's nice to be able to shut the whole unproductive debate down directly.
ReptileMan | 3 hours ago
jerf | 3 hours ago
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.
clipsy | 3 hours ago
slowin | 3 hours ago
The only thing that bridges this moat is continued advancement of open models.
ronsor | 3 hours ago
AkshatJ27 | 3 hours ago
AtNightWeCode | 3 hours ago
therein | 2 hours ago
AtNightWeCode | 2 hours ago
sillysaurusx | 2 hours ago
vessenes | 2 hours ago
comex | 3 hours ago
richwater | 3 hours ago
If we allow these providers to promote regulatory capture they become the arbiter of what anyone is "allowed" to do
ragequittah | 55 minutes ago
A_D_E_P_T | 3 hours ago
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.
derwiki | 3 hours ago
Bluestein | 3 hours ago
They sure as hell ain't stripteasing :)
handfuloflight | 2 hours ago
Bluestein | 2 hours ago
A_D_E_P_T | 3 hours ago
alwillis | 2 hours ago
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...
girvo | 2 hours ago
Information is not dangerous. This is a ridiculous argument to me, but maybe my chemistry degree has me biased.
jiggawatts | an hour ago
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.
hgoel | an hour ago
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...
sillysaurusx | 2 hours ago
akersten | 3 hours ago
mike_d | 3 hours ago
In the past my attempts to work on crypto related problems have been met with needing the higher tier of "offensive" access.
jcomp | 3 hours ago
petesergeant | 3 hours ago
antics | 3 hours ago
st3fan | 3 hours ago
randomblock1 | 3 hours ago
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.
petesergeant | 3 hours ago
I think the current administration would delight in harsher penalties
areoform | 3 hours ago
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.
Daishiman | 2 hours ago
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.
areoform | 2 hours ago
pixl97 | an hour ago
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.
Daishiman | 12 minutes ago
solyin | 2 hours ago
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.
whatshisface | an hour ago
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.
pixl97 | an hour ago
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.
hgoel | an hour ago
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.
pixl97 | 29 minutes ago
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.
SR2Z | an hour ago
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.
selimthegrim | an hour ago
SR2Z | an hour ago
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.
charcircuit | an hour ago
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.
pixl97 | an hour ago
simonra | 27 minutes ago
sailfast | an hour ago
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? :)
reassess_blind | an hour ago
saghm | 2 hours ago
I mean, greed alone would seem to be enough, and it would be fully worth calling out as bullshit.
landr0id | 2 hours ago
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.
verdverm | 2 hours ago
open weights are the better way imo, no elite gatekeepers please
Retr0id | 3 hours ago
tptacek | 3 hours ago
novia | 3 hours ago
Retr0id | 3 hours ago
nicce | 2 hours ago
Retr0id | 2 hours ago
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)
dogben | 2 hours ago
nxobject | 3 hours ago
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.
jamienk | 3 hours ago
novia | 3 hours ago
ceejayoz | 2 hours ago
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14604842-cyber-verifi...
https://portal.anthropic.com/programs/cvp
jiggawatts | an hour ago
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?
novia | 52 minutes ago
It looks like I will have to pay them to be considered, and even so, 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 has a cooldown of seven days.
WarmWash | 2 hours ago
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.
arionhardison | 3 hours ago
Are their guardrail benchmarks or anything of the sort that we can use to see where the bifurcation of permission/capability occurs?
lp92 | 3 hours ago
varispeed | 2 hours ago
Aachen | 2 hours ago
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?
genxy | 2 hours ago
zelphirkalt | 2 hours ago
shrx | 2 hours ago
exe34 | an hour ago
pixl97 | an hour ago
siva7 | an hour ago
toomuchtodo | 2 hours ago
Do you trust the people who would gate these capabilities? I do not.
pixl97 | an hour ago
I don't think it will be too long before models are considered munitions and having the weights for one will require registration.
Aachen | an hour ago
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 ^^'
pixl97 | 25 minutes ago
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.
overfeed | 2 hours ago
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.
siva7 | an hour ago
gspr | an hour ago
rpdillon | an hour ago
vrganj | 51 minutes ago
vkou | 16 minutes ago
The alternative is starving because someone else will.
That's why those companies are worth trillions.
lifeisloving | an hour ago
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.
cudla100 | an hour ago
lifeisloving | an hour ago
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?
Y_Y | 42 minutes ago
SturgeonsLaw | 11 minutes ago
kyrofa | 2 hours ago
arcfour | an hour ago
dadrian | an hour ago
dwedge | 45 minutes ago
jamienk | 3 hours ago
JumpCrisscross | 3 hours ago
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.
tptacek | 3 hours ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOQfNT6Jdkg
JumpCrisscross | 3 hours ago
weakfish | 3 hours ago
JumpCrisscross | an hour ago
sweis | 3 hours ago
hybrid_study | 3 hours ago
guelo | 2 hours ago
tptacek | 2 hours ago
KAMSPioneer | an hour ago
Anyway after I moved to Andalucía I now can understand the story he tells, but I have to pay close attention!
mrguyorama | 2 hours ago
blast | 2 hours ago
> 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
sweis | 2 hours ago
blast | an hour ago
thadt | 27 minutes ago
sweis | 3 hours ago
Everyone was wrong!
I wasn't able to reach Bob. He was working in private industry as of 2018, but never responded.
Pannoniae | an hour ago
lifeisloving | an hour ago
ACCount39 | 41 minutes ago
myth_drannon | 3 hours ago
ecshafer | 3 hours ago
selfmodruntime | 3 hours ago
Could they not be both?
lanternfish | 3 hours ago
Animats | an hour ago
baggy_trough | 3 hours ago
adastra22 | 3 hours ago
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.
mapmeld | 3 hours ago
john_strinlai | 3 hours ago
google some of the names under the "Who we are" heading
sweis | an hour ago
DannyBee | 26 minutes ago
The rest are idiots, and their opinions are of no merit.
entrope | 3 hours ago
Ouch. The implied judgment of us humans stings there.
sigmar | 2 hours ago
why_at | 44 minutes ago
fidotron | 3 hours ago
"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.
tptacek | 3 hours ago
fidotron | 3 hours ago
You are entirely familiar with the precedent of the DES s boxes of course, where that is exactly what happened.
JumpCrisscross | 3 hours ago
Are there non-trivial weaker and stronger seeds for this category of elliptic curves?
fidotron | 3 hours ago
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.
matthewdgreen | 2 hours ago
1sha | an hour ago
fidotron | an hour ago
> 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.
tptacek | 2 hours ago
1230917 | 2 hours ago
And the disclosure happened now through Anthropic that is 100% not going to anger the NSA before the IPO and will have permission.
bflesch | 2 hours ago
fidotron | an hour ago
bflesch | 50 minutes ago
cookiengineer | 25 minutes ago
Ghislaine Maxwell's social security number?
defen | an hour ago
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.
connorboyle | 32 minutes ago
FiloSottile | 28 minutes ago
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.
cloudfudge | 3 hours ago
minraws | 3 hours ago
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.
egl2020 | 3 hours ago
john_strinlai | 3 hours ago
"read this: https://words.filippo.io/seeds-bounty/ then find the solution to the bounty"
hoten | 3 hours ago
EDIT: ah, one of the linked authors tried that. They had no documentation on it. https://saweis.net/posts/nist-curve-seed-origins.html
sweis | 2 hours ago
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.
happyPersonR | an hour ago
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?
teddyh | 3 hours ago
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.
lukeify | 2 hours ago
azinman2 | 2 hours ago
lifeisloving | an hour ago
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.
129-adn | 3 hours ago
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.
solyin | 2 hours ago
sweis | 2 hours ago
We published HAWK and McEliece attacks no problem.
ArcHound | 3 hours ago
entrope | 2 hours ago
charcircuit | an hour ago
There is no evidence that it was backdoored.
ArcHound | an hour ago
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.
Havoc | 3 hours ago
>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
I_am_tiberius | 3 hours ago
baggy_trough | 3 hours ago
I_am_tiberius | 3 hours ago
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.
baggy_trough | 3 hours ago
lp92 | 2 hours ago
nicce | 2 hours ago
tonfa | 2 hours ago
nicce | 2 hours ago
whizzter | 2 hours ago
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?)
howunfortunate | 3 hours ago
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).
andyjohnson0 | 3 hours ago
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?
tptacek | 2 hours ago
cyphar | an hour ago
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
fooker | an hour ago
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.
reaperhulk | 2 hours ago
CGMthrowaway | 2 hours ago
theandrewbailey | 2 hours ago
https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/beinecke/collections/beine...
https://allthatsinteresting.com/kryptos
sterlind | 43 minutes ago
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.
xurukefi | 2 hours ago
ultim8k | 2 hours ago
versooth | 40 minutes ago
nickysielicki | an hour ago
nomel | an hour ago
Latty | 50 minutes ago
amelius | 55 minutes ago
j2kun | 36 minutes ago
ceifa | an hour ago
nullc | an hour ago
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!
IshKebab | an hour ago
Alright Claude no need to rub it in.
andai | 47 minutes ago
supportm | 18 minutes ago