Claude Cracks 25-Year NSA Cryptography Mystery in Under 30 Minutes

Claude Cracks 25-Year NSA Cryptography Mystery in Under 30 Minutes

Anthropic has revealed that an internal research version of its Claude AI model solved one of cryptography's longest-running puzzles in under 30 minutes — the mysterious origin of the NIST elliptic curve seeds supplied by the NSA.

The seeds behind five NIST curves — P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 — secure websites, payments and government traffic worldwide, but the NSA never explained how they were chosen. The old theory held that they were hashes of a humorous phrase like "Give Bob and Jerry a raise." Claude found the truth instead: the seeds were ordinary output from lrand48, a standard 1990s C-library random number generator, seeded with the computer's Unix clock. The P-256 seed came from a run started on August 16, 1997, as the 1,842nd candidate.

The finding was verified by a ten-person Anthropic team and independently reproduced by cryptographer Filippo Valsorda, who first posted the $36,864 bounty in 2023 and will donate it to the Internet Security Research Group. Importantly, Claude did not break encryption or expose any private keys — but the discovery makes it far less likely that those curve seeds were deliberately crafted to hide a backdoor.

Source: Crowdfund Insider

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