Claude will dig
Until Claude comes on the scene. This month, an Anthropic employee asked an internal research model to investigate, without sharing the old theory that the seeds came from a forgotten phrase.
It took the model less than half an hour to trace five initial NIST curve values to lrand48, a random number generator found in old C software libraries.
Claude reproduced the sequence behind P-256, a widely used curve, and found an exact match for his published seed in the 1,842nd candidate.
“This is amazing: this solves a 25-year-old mystery,” the model wrote in his recorded reasoning, after briefly wondering if he was working as part of a mock test. “Hmm, is this plausible in reality? To my knowledge…the bounty has not been resolved….All higher bits are clear: 20 bits, chance 1e-6. So indeed in the real world.”
“Wow, that’s a real discovery.”
Anyone can now run the program again and get the numbers provided by the NSA. Anthropic says this makes a hidden weakness much less likely, although the team still can’t explain why the program ignored certain usable candidates or how other parts of the curves were chosen.
It was this predictability that allowed Claude to reconstruct the numbers, and it would be a disaster for a portfolio. A secret key generated with lrand48 could be recreated by anyone who calculated approximately when it was created, giving them everything needed to drain the funds.
Gn bussni
