Anthropic's Claude Solves a 25-Year NSA Elliptic Curve Mystery in 30 Minutes

Huo Xing Finance reports that Anthropic’s AI model Claude solved a 25-year-old cryptographic puzzle in under 30 minutes, tracing a set of numbers provided by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) to the U.S. government in the late 1990s back to a common random number generator program with timestamps from 1997 and 1998. These numbers had long been suspected of harboring backdoors. In 2000, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) adopted a set of elliptic curves provided by the NSA, but the NSA never explained the origin of the seed numbers used to generate these curves. Suspicion of backdoors intensified after Snowden revealed that the NSA had attempted to weaken cryptographic standards. Cryptographers Neal Koblitz and Alfred Menezes discussed this controversy in a 2015 paper, and security researcher Steve Weis spent years searching for answers; in 2023, Filippo Valsorda and others even established a bounty for its resolution. Claude traced five NIST curve seeds to the lrand48 random number generator in an old C software library and reproduced the widely used P-256 curve sequence, finding an exact match to the published seed on the 1,842nd candidate. Anthropic stated that this greatly reduces the likelihood of hidden weaknesses, and users of NIST curves need make no changes. Bitcoin is unaffected, as its wallets use the simpler secp256k1 curve, which leaves little room for covertly implanted weaknesses. The $36,864 bounty will be donated to the Internet Security Research Group, the nonprofit behind Let’s Encrypt.