Security · Updated 17 Oct, 08:12 pm IST
Anthropic's Claude solves 25-year NSA cryptography seed mystery
Why it matters for readers: Explains a decades-old tech mystery and shows AI can uncover subtle patterns in technical data quickly.
- Claude determined the NIST ECDSA curve seeds came from lrand48, a simple C random number generator.1
- The lrand48 generator had been initialized with a Unix timestamp between May 1997 and April 1998, which explains systematic zero top bits in some seeds.1
- Anthropic says this finding makes the idea of deliberate backdoors in those curves less likely.1
- Claude produced the result in under 30 minutes and Anthropic will donate the $36,864 bounty to the Internet Security Research Group.1
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