The AI model Claude from Anthropic has solved a 25-year-old cryptographic mystery involving the origin of five seed values provided by the US National Security Agency (NSA). These values were used to generate elliptic curves for cryptographic standards approved by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2000.
In under 30 minutes, the model identified the source as lrand48, a pseudorandom number generator from an old C programming language library. For the P-256 curve, the model achieved an exact match on the 1842nd iteration. This discovery addresses long-standing suspicions that the NSA might have selected specific parameters to create vulnerabilities in security systems.
The mystery was previously analyzed by cryptographers Neal Koblitz and Alfred Menezes in a 2015 paper. In 2023, a group led by Filippo Valsorda offered a bounty for the solution, starting at $12 288 and reaching $36 864 if donated to charity. The reward will now be directed to the Internet Security Research Group, which supports the Let's Encrypt project.
Anthropic noted that the findings do not imply a compromise of systems or the existence of a secret backdoor. Users of these curves are not required to change their security settings. The Bitcoin-related curve secp256k1 was not involved in this study, as its parameters are constructed differently.
