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  • Hacker News
  • So it’s pretty clear that Anthropic is privately trying to break cryptography.
    by nickysielicki
  • > is it suspicious that such an obvious thing wasn’t discovered in 25 years?

    Ouch. The implied judgment of us humans stings there.

    by entrope
  • 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.
    by I_am_tiberius
  • > 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.

    by teddyh
  • 13 years of tinfoil hats for srand48(time(NULL)
    by sweis
  • This is devastating news... for an entire generation of NIST cryptography conspiracy theories.
    by tptacek
  • “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.

    by JumpCrisscross
  • 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.

    by fidotron

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