Anthropics' Claude cracks a 25-year-old NSA cryptography mystery in under 30 minutes
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Anthropic's AI model Claude has successfully solved a 25-year-old cryptographic mystery regarding the seeds used in NIST's elliptic curve digital signature algorithm standards. Since their standardization in 2000, there has been widespread suspicion that the NSA-supplied seeds contained hidden backdoors due to the lack of explanation for their generation. Previous theories, including one by late NSA employee Jerry Solinas, failed to identify the origin of these values. However, Claude analyzed the data and determined within 30 minutes that the seeds were generated using 'lrand48,' a simple C random number generator. The analysis revealed that the seeds were initialized with Unix timestamps from between May 1997 and April 1998. This finding is significant because the specific bit patterns observed are consistent with the limitations of the lrand48 algorithm rather than deliberate manipulation. Consequently, this discovery makes the likelihood of intentional backdoors far less probable. Anthropic has donated the $36,864 bounty associated with the puzzle to the Internet Security Research Group.
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