Comment by JumpCrisscross
1 day 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.
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.
Kind of sus that they would spread a rumor that its a phrase. This isnt something I would forget, or confuse with a timestamp..
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.
There is one that Claude couldn't find perhaps that is from the phrase.
But I do agree, it is unusual actually that the code was lost.
It is also unusual that they didn't include how they derived the seed, and weren't forced to pick a randomly generated one.
I guess these are all things that would happen today but this was not so long ago to my mind so it is a surprise it didn't happen!
One possibility is that they created multiple seeds, and misremembered which one they eventually went with. Although, it's weird no one ever said "or it might have been a timestamp".
Exactly what the NSA would say.
Maybe that explanation covers the rest that wasn’t identified?
or they were lying...
Someone just posted this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOQfNT6Jdkg
> Someone
> 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
A buddy did it with Claude, so zero time.
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Genuine question, how many days of your life have you had to spend on this particular tinfoil convention?
Some previous discussions started based on these posts: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2015/10/22/a-riddle... https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1018
Video is meant as a joke, it’s common to edit the subtitles of this video to alternate ones
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understanding Spanish throws it off, but this is hilarious either way. LOL
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.
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That's one of the best executed implementations of that joke I've seen in years.