I turned out to be right in my advocacy years ago, here is my post: https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/eip-7212-precompiled-for-se...
But it's nice to be able to shut the whole unproductive debate down directly.
Is it impossible? It is hard to prove impossible. But this is not what I would expect backdoors to look like.
In fact this makes me think that the information about how these were generated must have been lost very early in the process, or over-compartmentalized away from the wrong people. It seems like the NSA should have been positively delighted to show that these were the origins of the seeds as they are decent "nothing up my sleeve" numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing-up-my-sleeve_number Advertising that fact should have been advantageous to the NSA if that is indeed how they were generated, so my best guess is that the parts of the NSA that should have been showing us that must not have themselves known.
The only thing that bridges this moat is continued advancement of open models.
If we allow these providers to promote regulatory capture they become the arbiter of what anyone is "allowed" to do
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.
Everyone was wrong!
I wasn't able to reach Bob. He was working in private industry as of 2018, but never responded.
Could they not be both?
Uh… did you talk to any cryptographers? This is EXACTLY what a weak curve would look like. Imagine that 1 in a thousand, or one in a million keys, selected at random, are vulnerable to some withheld attack. This approach lets you vary the timestamp or number of iterations until a weak key is found, then have plausible deniability afterward. This is why modern systems choose constants in a way with no free choice of parameters (e.g. sqrt of 2 for first constant, cube root for second constant, etc.).
They even note later in the article that viable curves in the generator sequence seem to have been skipped.
google some of the names under the "Who we are" heading
That's not how math works!
Ouch. The implied judgment of us humans stings there.
"It is still conceivable that these curves were selected to have a specific property in principle by searching over timestamps to the random number generator."
Yes.
"However, you would only need to do that if you were going to disclose the timestamp as some evidence that the seed was innocuously generated."
Does not logically follow when "doing and saying nothing" will completely suffice.
You are entirely familiar with the precedent for the DES s boxes of course, where that is exactly what happened.
Are there weaker and stronger seeds for this category of elliptic curves?
"read this: https://words.filippo.io/seeds-bounty/ then find the solution to the bounty"
EDIT: ah, one of the linked authors tried that. They had no documentation on it. https://saweis.net/posts/nist-curve-seed-origins.html
The simplest explanation would be that it was generated the same way as the others, but somebody mistyped a digit somewhere along the way to publishing, and therefore a solution could not be found with the assumption that the number is correct.
Indeed! And we guess that OpenAI was gagged by the NSA because the massive proof dump on Oct. 6th did not contain cryptographic results.
I assume that Anthropic faces similar restrictions, so this seems kind of approved.
>provided by the NSA with no explanation or justification.
Really? Nobody is concerned about the NSA just cheerfully dictating that? Smells very rainbow-table-y
As this is going on, Anthropic has opened up their own biology lab.
> https://www.reuters.com/world/anthropic-quietly-sets-up-biol...
There is very much a situation where people in frontier labs have access to exceptional capabilities that are being kept from the rest of us, and they're using it to strip-mine technical and scientific problems.
They sure as hell ain't stripteasing :)
In the past my attempts to work on crypto related problems have been met with needing the higher tier of "offensive" access.
Anthropic wants to IPO, they don't want another Fable shutdown situation.
To be clear I would prefer the cyber safeguards to be less restrictive, I think they're currently too much. I often go to open models because of it. But there are likelier reasons to restrict cyber than world domination.
I think the current administration would delight in harsher penalties
Part of me wonders whether the NSA/other TLA has either (a) an unrestricted model from a lab with less scruples like SpaceX, or (b) an in-house model, either abliterated or with data they've bought themselves.
Are their guardrail benchmarks or anything of the sort that we can use to see where the bifurcation of permission/capability occurs?
sweis•38m ago
217•24m ago
bayarearefugee•15m ago
Probably not quite this given the timestamps span over almost a year (but have some clustering in August 1997).
Given that the spread suggests they weren't just now() timestamps it would actually be interesting to know what the significance of the timestamps is, if any. Though it could be something boring like randomly sampling some local file creation times.