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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

“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.

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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.

or they were lying...

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.

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".

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!

Maybe that explanation covers the rest that wasn’t identified?

Exactly what the NSA would say.

Someone just posted this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOQfNT6Jdkg

Genuine question, how many days of your life have you had to spend on this particular tinfoil convention?

Video is meant as a joke, it’s common to edit the subtitles of this video to alternate ones

Tptacek is an expert in this field. I imagine he's had to spend a considerable amount of time explaining why ECDSA probably aren't nerfed.

Some previous discussions started based on these posts: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2015/10/22/a-riddle... https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1018

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.

Is this like what Downfall is like for Germans?

German speaker, the Downfall memes strangely still work fine even if you understand the audio because he's doing inane angry rambling either way.

Just to add here that this guy doesn't have a "standard" Spanish accent. He was from Andalucía (I don't remember where exactly), a region rather known for its accent being difficult for even native speakers to understand.

Anyway after I moved to Andalucía I now can understand the story he tells, but I have to pay close attention!

I always thought this was from Mexico!

Spanish native here. Andalusian accent never was known by being difficult to understand. Have other associations, but never that it's difficult to understand.

Some Andalusian accents can be really thick, but so can be the accents from other regions. It also depends where from Spain you are from: I am from Extremadura and usually don't have any trouble understanding even the strongest Andalusian accent, but some of my Basque and Catalonian colleagues find it really difficult, but the opposite is also true.

I'm Basque. It was just difficult the first times, kinda like a hick accent from the US for English speakers (or Irish/Scott). The following listenings were really easy to understand.

For English speakers: North and Castille (middle) Spanish it's like vanilla Spanish. It's understood almost everywhere modulo some jargon. Kinda like English from the BBC or the NBC/NPR/CNN.

Andalusian Spamish it's like Southern English: Fast speech, ommited consonants and merged words and some loanwords from Arabic used in everyday words but for us they are like ancient Spanish (Arabic origin alcancia vs hucha). Kinda like the borrowings from Spanish in the Southern US Engish). Lasso vs lace/ribbon, aficionado vs fan and so on.

West Andalusia, maybe; but the Eastern accents plus Murcia are hard-drunken Irish mode for Spanish.

he is doing a deep deep Andalusian accent, plus the extra noises and laughs makes hard to understand. The normal Andalusian accent it's perfectly understandable by anyone that understands Spanish.

That's one of the best executed implementations of that joke I've seen in years.

> 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.

Oh I even saw your other posts in this thread but didn't recognize the name. So much for my research skills

I mean, at least you didn’t spend the last 20 years hashing 2^51 sentences in your research.

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