> Recovering Encrypted LLM Reasoning Traces

A few days ago, a paper named “Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs” was published. It describes a simple, yet super elegant way to recover encrypted LLM reasoning traces. Naturally, I had to try it. Background AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic send reasoning traces back and forth as part of their messaging protocols. However, the actual reasoning text is hidden inside an encrypted, base64-encoded blob.