Anthropic disclosed that its internal Claude research model took only about 30 minutes to solve a cryptography mystery that had puzzled researchers for roughly 25 years: where did the five elliptic-curve seeds that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) supplied to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) come from?
Key points:
- The source was an old random-number generator: The five seeds (for curves P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521) came from lrand48, a random-number generator in a 1990s C library, seeded with Unix timestamps from 1997 to 1998.
- Backdoor fears greatly eased: Because the seeds came from a reproducible, ordinary timestamp-seeded random process rather than a secret design, the chance that the curves hide a deliberate backdoor is much lower. The finding breaks no encryption, and users need take no action.
- The bounty will be donated: Anthropic said it will donate the $36,864 puzzle bounty to the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG).
Note that this conclusion is Anthropic's own disclosure and has not yet been independently verified; why some candidate values were skipped remains unexplained.
Source: Read the original. This is a summarized digest for reference only.
