Anthropic's Claude AI has successfully cracked a 25-year-old cryptography mystery surrounding the National Security Agency's elliptic-curve seeds in under 30 minutes. The National Institute of Standards and Technology standardized several curves in the ECDSA framework back in 2000, for which the NSA supplied seeds with zero explanation, fueling suspicions of potential backdoors and prompting years of amateur sleuthing and a bounty.
Claude identified that the seeds originated from the simple C random number generator lrand48, initialized with a Unix timestamp between May 1997 and April 1998. The AI spotted the pattern because lrand48 only outputs 31 bits, and the top bits in certain seeds were systematically zero. According to Anthropic, this discovery indicates that deliberate backdoors are less likely, and the company is donating the $36,864 bounty to the Internet Security Research Group.
This breakthrough demonstrates advanced analytical capabilities in modern artificial intelligence, successfully resolving a long-standing cryptographic puzzle that had baffled human experts for decades.