https://www.anthropic.com/research/ecdsa-curve-origins To try to explain this: basically, there are P256-style encryption curves, and they’re generated by giving them a seed. The government published the seed that it used to generate the P256 encryption curve that’s used for web traffic. Here’s the problem: some P256-style curves are flawed and can be hacked, and people were worried that the seed the government used to generate the P256 curve that everyone uses on the Internet produced one of those hackable curves. They thought that the government had custom designed a seed to generate a weak curve so that it could backdoor into it. What Claude did was show that all the government did was run a common random number generator (lrand48) and try 1,842 seeds from it until it got one that gave a non-flawed curve. So that puts to bed any idea that the government did some evil scientist stuff. There is one weird thing, though, which is that they got their first non-flawed curve on try 876, and we don’t know why they did another 966, but anyways, this is evidence on the side that the government didn’t do something weird. How it did this is honestly mind boggling. The public P256 seed is twenty successive numbers from that random number generator, each of them divided by about 8.4 million, converted into hexadecimal, and then placed in sequential order, so the seed was 20 randomly generated numbers in sequential order. How Claude figured out that this was the random number generator used, that they generated 20 numbers, divided them by 8.4 million and placed them in sequential order to create the seed, and that the random number generator, which had to get its own seed to start generating random numbers, was given the date and time when it was run as its seed, is honestly really impressive. Basically, we think that it tried a bunch of smart possibilities until one of them indisputably worked, but it’s kind of, I don’t know, it’s impressive and a little scary. submitted by /u/DavidovicZuki
Originally posted by u/DavidovicZuki on r/ArtificialInteligence
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