‘Wow, it’s a real discovery’: Claude cracks a 25-year NSA number mystery — SkimNews
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- Claude traced five unexplained NIST elliptic curve seeds supplied by the NSA to lrand48, a random-number generator found in older C software libraries, in less than 30 minutes — solving a mystery cryptographers had chased since 2000.
- Claude reproduced the sequence behind P-256, finding an exact match for its published seed at the 1,842nd candidate, after being asked to investigate without the old theory that the seeds came from a forgotten phrase by NSA mathematician Jerry Solinas.
- Anthropic says the finding makes a hidden NSA backdoor much less likely and that users of the NIST curves do not need to take action, though questions remain about how the program passed over some usable candidates or how other curve elements were selected.
- Bitcoin was never part of the guessing game because it uses secp256k1, a simpler curve defined by two small fixed numbers that leave almost no dials to adjust — leaving little room for a hidden weakness.
- The $36,864 bounty — originally $12,288, raised higher if the winner donated to charity — will go to the Internet Security Research Group, the nonprofit behind Let's Encrypt, fulfilling a 2023 pledge from cryptography engineer Filippo Valsorda and other contributors.
- Google said this week its Willow quantum chip cut errors roughly 40-fold in one of the costliest steps a quantum attack would need, though no machine yet exists that is large or reliable enough to crack a bitcoin key.
Why it matters: The finding deflates long-standing fears that the NSA planted a backdoor in NIST's P-256 and related curves, letting anyone rerun lrand48 and retrace the path to the published seeds. The $36,864 bounty closes the loop for cryptographers who spent decades — including 2018 FOIA requests — chasing Jerry Solinas's numbers; Bitcoin's secp256k1 curve was never part of the puzzle because its simplicity leaves no room for concealed weaknesses.
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