Odaily Planet Daily News: The AI model Claude cracked the 25-year-old mystery surrounding the origin of the U.S. National Security Agency's (NSA) elliptic curve parameters in less than 30 minutes, tracing the elliptic curve seed adopted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2000 back to an older random number generator used between 1997 and 1998.
Claude discovered that five groups of NIST elliptic curve seeds were related to the lrand48 random number generator in an older C language software library, and found a value that exactly matched the widely used P-256 curve seed on the 1,842nd candidate, successfully reproducing its generation process.
Previously, due to the NSA's long-standing failure to explain the origin of these parameters, there was widespread suspicion that they might contain cryptographic backdoors. Anthropic stated that this discovery significantly reduces the likelihood that these parameters were intentionally weakened, and existing NIST elliptic curve users do not need to take any additional action.
Additionally, Bitcoin uses the different secp256k1 elliptic curve, which is unaffected by this incident. The associated research bounty of $36,864 will be donated to the Internet Security Research Group, the nonprofit behind Let's Encrypt.