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The Anthropic research team says its internal research model Claude figured out how the seeds for the NIST P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 curves were generated in under half an hour. The team says these seeds did not come from a hash algorithm, but rather from the output of the 1990s C library lrand48 random number generator seeded with a Unix timestamp, with the P-256 seed being the result of the 1842nd iteration. The team stresses that this is not a cryptographic break or a new attack; rather, it makes the possibility that the curves were deliberately implanted with a backdoor less likely, because anyone can reproduce this generation process. Claude also recovered the FreeLIP generator seed used for the base points of P-192 and some ANSI X9.62 example curves, but the B-163 seed and the method for generating the base points of P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 remain unexplained. The related $36,864 bounty will be donated to the Internet Security Research Group.
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Claude cracks the mystery of the P-256 elliptic curve seed origin in half an hourDevelopments
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- Source:Anthropic Research
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Oct 18
AYi AI Notes
Claude cracks the mystery of the P-256 elliptic curve seed origin in half an hour
AYi AI Notes relays that Claude cracked, in under half an hour, the mystery of the random seed origin of the P-256 elliptic curve that had puzzled the cryptography community for 26 years; the seed was not a backdoor, but the 1,842nd candidate produced in timestamp order by an engineer in 1997 calling the C language lrand48 function. The author stresses that this is not an attack on the mathematical principles of encryption, bank accounts and encrypted communications need no changes, and the related bounty has doubled to $36,864 and been donated to an open-source security foundation. The author believes this event demonstrates the model's reasoning ability to piece together clues across programming habits, compiler characteristics, and mathematical verification.
36Kr · AI
Anthropic says Claude traced the source of NIST elliptic curve seeds in half an hour
Anthropic published a study: an employee gave Claude's internal research model the question of the source of the NIST elliptic curve seeds, which had puzzled the cryptography community for more than twenty years, and Claude traced within less than half an hour that the seeds for P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 came from the lrand48 pseudorandom number generator in the C language library, with the initial state determined by the Unix timestamp. Anthropic said the finding did not break ECDSA and did not bring new attack methods, but it reduced the possibility that the relevant curves had been deliberately implanted with backdoors. Claude also traced that the base points of six curves including P-192 came from FreeLIP's random number generator, though the source of the B-163 curve seed and how the base points of some curves were generated remain unexplained.
Oct 17
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