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The decades-old mystery behind NIST elliptic curve seeds is resolved alongside a 37-year-old OpenBSD kernel flaw and new local LLM tooling.

1. 01

   Security·Hacker News

   Anthropic researchers resolve origins of NIST elliptic curve seeds

   Anthropic researchers have solved the decades-old mystery behind the NIST P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384, and P-521 elliptic curve seeds specified in FIPS 186-2. Long suspected of potentially concealing NSA backdoors, the seeds were revealed not to be hashes of secret passphrases, but outputs of the standard C library random number generator (lrand48/drand48) seeded with Unix timestamps from 1997.

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2. 02

   Security·Hacker News

   Calif discloses 37-year-old privilege escalation bug in OpenBSD kernel

   Security researchers at Calif documented a local privilege escalation flaw in OpenBSD tracing back roughly 37 years to early BSD sources. The SysV shared memory attachment counter was originally defined as a signed 16-bit integer, allowing repeated process forking to push the counter past 32,767 and wrap it into negative numbers.

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3. 03

   AI·Hacker News

   Apple ML Research demonstrates frontier LLM inference with MLX on Mac Studio

   Apple Machine Learning Research published benchmarks showing local and distributed LLM inference on M5 Ultra Mac Studio hardware using the MLX framework. Evaluating the 816-billion-parameter Muse Spark Open mixture-of-experts model in NVFP4 precision across a cluster of four Mac Studios linked via RDMA over Thunderbolt, the setup generated over 36 tokens per second at 8,192 context.

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