Anthropics' Claude cracks a 25-year-old NSA cryptography mystery in under 30 minutes
Anthropic's AI model Claude has solved a 25-year-old cryptography puzzle. The mysterious seeds behind NIST's standard curves for digital signatures were provided by the NSA without explanation, raising long-standing suspicion about built-in backdoors. Claude figured out in under 30 minutes that the seeds came from "lrand48," a simple C random number generator, making deliberate backdoors far less likely.
Via The Decoder
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Oct 17, 2026
Anthropic's AI Claude has solved a 25-year-old cryptography mystery. NIST standardized several curves in the ECDSA standard, the most widely used framework for elliptic-curve digital signatures, back in 2000. The NSA had supplied the seeds, the starting values used to generate the curve parameters, with zero explanation. No one knew how they were created, and that fueled suspicion of possible backdoors. The mystery even attracted a bounty and amateur sleuthing efforts. The late NSA…
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