Anthropic's Claude solves 25-year-old NSA ECDSA seed mystery in under 30 minutes
Original titleAnthropics' Claude cracks a 25-year-old NSA cryptography mystery in under 30 minutes
Anthropic's Claude reportedly identified that the NSA-supplied seeds for NIST's ECDSA curves came from the lrand48 random number generator, seeded with a Unix timestamp between May 1997 and April 1998.
Claude spotted the pattern because lrand48 outputs only 31 bits, with the top bits systematically zero in some seeds.
According to Anthropic, this makes deliberate backdoors less likely, and the company is donating the $36,864 bounty to the Internet Security Research Group.
This story is featured in top picks: “Claude finds the origin of NIST elliptic curve seeds in a timestamp-based generator”
Source: The Decoder · the-decoder.comPublished · added here