Claude cracks NSA's 25-year elliptic curve seed puzzle

PANews October 17 news, according to CoinDesk, an internal research model from Anthropic took less than half an hour to trace the origin of five elliptic curve seeds that the NSA provided to NIST in the late 1990s: these numbers, long suspected of hiding a backdoor, were actually generated by the random number generator lrand48 in an old C language library combined with timestamps from 1997 and 1998. The model reproduced the widely used P-256 curve sequence and exactly matched the published seed at the 1,842nd candidate value. Anthropic said this finding greatly reduces the possibility of a hidden backdoor, and users of NIST curves need not take any action, but it still cannot explain why the program skipped some available candidate values. Bitcoin uses the simpler secp256k1 curve and is not included in this, although sufficiently powerful quantum computers still pose another threat. The bounty of $36,864 will be donated to ISRG, the organization behind Let's Encrypt.