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.
Aachen 1 hours ago [-]
> [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?
overfeed 29 minutes ago [-]
> 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 based on the AI labs Sherlocking entire industries, and yet CEOs, mathematicians, and everyone else are eagerly feeding the beast their most prized information.
siva7 11 minutes ago [-]
What else should we do? It's not like we had any choice.
genxy 52 minutes ago [-]
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.
siva7 9 minutes ago [-]
That's already happening. The public models aren't anything like their internal models.
zelphirkalt 34 minutes ago [-]
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.
shrx 29 minutes ago [-]
A lesser model can supervise.
exe34 17 minutes ago [-]
Why can't Claude do that itself?
pixl97 24 minutes ago [-]
Just wait till the AI does that to humans in general.
toomuchtodo 36 minutes ago [-]
This is why open weights and continued model distillation to improve model evolution is imperative.
Do you trust the people who would gate these capabilities? I do not.
pixl97 22 minutes ago [-]
I mean I want this to, just don't get your hopes to high because it's not long till they get dashed.
I don't think it will be too long before models are considered munitions and having the weights for one will require registration.
Aachen 7 minutes ago [-]
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 ^^'
toomuchtodo 1 minutes ago [-]
I lived through PGP encryption being considered a munition and printed in a book to evade munitions controls. Print the weights out if you must and publish them in a book I can slice the binding off and digitize.
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.
arcfour 2 minutes ago [-]
Why would you be blocked? I cannot imagine why you would be for this specific task unless the supposed backdoor turned out to be real.
randomblock1 2 hours ago [-]
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.
areoform 2 hours ago [-]
> Maybe, but that's what the cyber program is for
Why?
> 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.
Reject this.
Daishiman 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
areoform 40 minutes ago [-]
OK, so then no problem, why are Anthropic restricting my ability to learn and reason?
pixl97 14 minutes ago [-]
Because they can and there is no law against it.
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.
solyin 1 hours ago [-]
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.
whatshisface 26 minutes ago [-]
>if I ask Claude "how do I make cocaine"
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 18 minutes ago [-]
Because this is how the world works
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.
sailfast 14 minutes ago [-]
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? :)
charcircuit 22 minutes ago [-]
>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.
pixl97 17 minutes ago [-]
This is so undershooting of what LLMs are capable of it's no wonder you're thinking they are just like books.
landr0id 1 hours ago [-]
>Maybe, but that's what the cyber program is for.
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 1 hours ago [-]
> that's what the cyber program is for
open weights are the better way imo, no elite gatekeepers please
saghm 1 hours ago [-]
> But there are likelier reasons to restrict cyber than world domination.
I mean, greed alone would seem to be enough, and it would be fully worth calling out as bullshit.
petesergeant 2 hours ago [-]
> Anthropic would get bad PR
I think the current administration would delight in harsher penalties
novia 2 hours ago [-]
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.
WarmWash 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
ceejayoz 51 minutes ago [-]
> I cannot figure out how to as an individual or a small startup request elevated permissions…
I worked on this specific task myself, using Claude, and I was not blocked (although I did not succeed!)
nicce 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Retr0id 1 hours ago [-]
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)
novia 2 hours ago [-]
A form of being blocked is sandbagging the models
Retr0id 2 hours ago [-]
I saw no evidence of sandbagging. And since it was an open problem, there'd be no reasonable way to "steer away" from the correct solution.
dogben 43 minutes ago [-]
Same. I tried it just a few days ago. This news made me almost jump out of bed.
tptacek 2 hours ago [-]
Same!
jamienk 2 hours ago [-]
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!
comex 2 hours ago [-]
I'm skeptical that this particular task would get blocked, though I could be wrong. But I agree that the moat is a problem in the general case.
A_D_E_P_T 2 hours ago [-]
I don't know about cryptography, but if you try anything in organic chemistry or biology, you virtually always get flagged and downgraded.
As this is going on, Anthropic has opened up their own biology lab.
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.
sillysaurusx 40 minutes ago [-]
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.
alwillis 1 hours ago [-]
> 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].
The strip teasing is all of their capability gating.
Bluestein 1 hours ago [-]
Come to think of it, indeed.-
jcomp 2 hours ago [-]
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.
akersten 2 hours ago [-]
At minimum we don't have access to "Claude thoughts" like the ones the article highlighted, right? That's part of the hidden reasoning?
petesergeant 2 hours ago [-]
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.
mike_d 2 hours ago [-]
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.
richwater 2 hours ago [-]
It doesn't matter what is blocked today, it matters what is blocked tomorrow.
If we allow these providers to promote regulatory capture they become the arbiter of what anyone is "allowed" to do
ronsor 2 hours ago [-]
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).
AkshatJ27 2 hours ago [-]
3 months ago is like years ago in the current AI landscape
vessenes 1 hours ago [-]
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.
AtNightWeCode 2 hours ago [-]
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.
sillysaurusx 38 minutes ago [-]
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.
therein 1 hours ago [-]
If you have a variable `const char *shellcode` in a fizzbuzz function, it is enough for it to lose its mind.
AtNightWeCode 1 hours ago [-]
It stopped me from doing basic bit operations. I have looked around and others have the same problem.
kyrofa 35 minutes ago [-]
Open models are just as quick to refuse to do stuff, in my experience.
arionhardison 2 hours ago [-]
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?
lp92 2 hours ago [-]
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.
nxobject 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
st3fan 2 hours ago [-]
Anyone can do this kind of work with a model as simple as GLM 5.3 or Kimi K3
antics 2 hours ago [-]
JFYI, this is not true. I do stuff like this all the time.
varispeed 1 hours ago [-]
Whenever I say that the rich have access to much more capable and unrestricted models I get downvotes. Yet here we have another example.
fidotron 2 hours ago [-]
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.
defen 10 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
tptacek 2 hours ago [-]
God bless you for keeping this alive.
fidotron 2 hours ago [-]
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.
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
> which may make them weaker or stronger than some other random numbers
Are there non-trivial weaker and stronger seeds for this category of elliptic curves?
fidotron 2 hours ago [-]
Exactly.
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 1 hours ago [-]
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.
1sha 29 seconds ago [-]
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.
tptacek 60 minutes ago [-]
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.
1230917 1 hours ago [-]
"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."
And the disclosure happened now through Anthropic that is 100% not going to anger the NSA before the IPO and will have permission.
bflesch 1 hours ago [-]
If you keep posting like this you're gonna get microwaved from space ;)
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
“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.
sweis 2 hours ago [-]
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.
lifeisloving 5 minutes ago [-]
Kind of sus that they would spread a rumor that its a phrase. This isnt something I would forget, or confuse with a timestamp..
Video is meant as a joke, it’s common to edit the subtitles of this video to alternate ones
mrguyorama 1 hours ago [-]
That's one of the best executed implementations of that joke I've seen in years.
hybrid_study 2 hours ago [-]
understanding Spanish throws it off, but this is hilarious either way. LOL
guelo 1 hours ago [-]
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.
tptacek 40 minutes ago [-]
Is this like what Downfall is like for Germans?
teddyh 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
lukeify 1 hours ago [-]
This is also why one of the Zodiac ciphers remained unsolved for so long. The dude made a mistake in his transcription.
azinman2 1 hours ago [-]
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.
sweis 2 hours ago [-]
13 years of tinfoil hats for srand48(time(NULL)
217 2 hours ago [-]
But the friends we made along the way!...
bayarearefugee 2 hours ago [-]
> 13 years of tinfoil hats for srand48(time(NULL)
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.
tptacek 2 hours ago [-]
This is devastating news... for an entire generation of NIST cryptography conspiracy theories.
nickysielicki 1 hours ago [-]
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.
sweis 47 minutes ago [-]
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.
yrjrjjrjjtjjr 42 minutes ago [-]
If they deny everything they didn't do, then whatever they don't deny will stand out.
tptacek 58 minutes ago [-]
It was a very different time back then.
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 53 minutes ago [-]
"independent cryptography community" - I actually LOLed at this
I don't think that "community" would accept any kind of answer as truthful so why waste the time...
nickysielicki 51 minutes ago [-]
It’s independently verifiable. What do you mean?
valleyer 14 minutes ago [-]
One of the top comments in this very thread suggests the seed timestamps were maybe selected specifically for purpose.
nickysielicki 27 minutes ago [-]
So it’s pretty clear that Anthropic is privately trying to break cryptography.
entrope 2 hours ago [-]
> is it suspicious that such an obvious thing wasn’t discovered in 25 years?
Ouch. The implied judgment of us humans stings there.
sigmar 57 minutes ago [-]
Did that clanker call us dumb? Scorch the skies, this means war.
jamienk 2 hours ago [-]
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<<
129-adn 2 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."
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.
sweis 43 minutes ago [-]
I have seen nothing that would make me believe there is a "[gag] by the NSA" preventing frontier labs from publishing cryptographic results.
We published HAWK and McEliece attacks no problem.
solyin 53 minutes ago [-]
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.
I_am_tiberius 2 hours ago [-]
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.
howunfortunate 2 hours ago [-]
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).
baggy_trough 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds entirely reasonable to me. They tried to give some credit. The main contribution is the solution that Claude came up with.
nicce 1 hours ago [-]
Maybe someone already figured it out, but it is well covered somewhere. And Claude just used it. I wonder if we ever know for sure.
whizzter 1 hours ago [-]
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?)
tonfa 1 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't they have claimed the bounty?
nicce 1 hours ago [-]
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.
I_am_tiberius 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
lp92 34 minutes ago [-]
How is that any different from a human that learned from another researcher or paper?
baggy_trough 2 hours ago [-]
I suppose so, but it's still the case.
selfmodruntime 2 hours ago [-]
> 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!
Could they not be both?
lanternfish 2 hours ago [-]
Extremely unlikely - these are very sparse domains.
cloudfudge 2 hours ago [-]
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. :)
hoten 2 hours ago [-]
Would it have been feasible for a FOIA to reveal the origin from the primary source?
As one of the original bounty sponsors, I'm thrilled to pay my portion to ISRG. :)
2 hours ago [-]
CGMthrowaway 1 hours ago [-]
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
ultim8k 1 hours ago [-]
I wait for the morning that we’ll wake up to ssh keys being useless
andyjohnson0 2 hours ago [-]
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?
tptacek 56 minutes ago [-]
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 hours ago [-]
xurukefi 1 hours ago [-]
Neat. Now they should figure out what's up with the secp256k1 curve and its weird generator point G where 1/2 G has 90 leading 0 bits.
2 hours ago [-]
EGreg 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ReptileMan 2 hours ago [-]
But what if there is a backdoor and just looped the RNG until they find the seeds that will match it. Just in case. /s
jerf 2 hours ago [-]
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.
clipsy 2 hours ago [-]
If there’s one thing everyone knows about conspiracy theorists, it’s that they’re willing to accept concrete disproof of their theories. /s
Havoc 2 hours ago [-]
>“seed” parameter
>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
myth_drannon 2 hours ago [-]
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) ?
ArcHound 2 hours ago [-]
Seems to me like a nothing burger? As long as there is no weakness, why should I care which PRNG shuffled bytes?
entrope 1 hours ago [-]
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.
ArcHound 3 minutes ago [-]
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.
charcircuit 9 minutes ago [-]
>like Dual_EC_DRBG was
There is no evidence that it was backdoored.
minraws 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
baggy_trough 2 hours ago [-]
Stochastic parrot truthers in shambles.
adastra22 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
mapmeld 2 hours ago [-]
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
2 hours ago [-]
john_strinlai 2 hours ago [-]
>Uh… did you talk to any cryptographers
google some of the names under the "Who we are" heading
Rendered at 21:12:50 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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 based on the AI labs Sherlocking entire industries, and yet CEOs, mathematicians, and everyone else are eagerly feeding the beast their most prized information.
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 ^^'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 mean, greed alone would seem to be enough, and it would be fully worth calling out as bullshit.
I think the current administration would delight in harsher penalties
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
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.
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...
Information is not dangerous. This is a ridiculous argument to me, but maybe my chemistry degree has me biased.
They sure as hell ain't stripteasing :)
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
Are their guardrail benchmarks or anything of the sort that we can use to see where the bifurcation of permission/capability occurs?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
Ouch. The implied judgment of us humans stings there.
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.
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).
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.
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.
https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/beinecke/collections/beine...
https://allthatsinteresting.com/kryptos
"read this: https://words.filippo.io/seeds-bounty/ then find the solution to the bounty"
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?
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.
>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
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 is no evidence that it was backdoored.
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