Anthropic's Claude cracks a 25-year-old NSA cryptography mystery in under 30 minutes

What happened

Anthropic's Claude solved the mystery of how the NSA generated seeds for elliptic curves standardized by NIST in 2000, reportedly in under 30 minutes. The seeds came from `lrand48`, initialized with a Unix timestamp between May 1997 and April 1998; systematically zero top bits pointed to the generator's 31-bit output. According to Anthropic, the finding makes deliberate backdoors less likely, and the company is donating the $36,864 bounty to the Internet Security Research Group.

Reported by 2 sources

The story so far

Anthropic said an internal Claude research model reconstructed how five NIST elliptic-curve seeds were generated in under 30 minutes, tracing them to the lrand48 pseudorandom number generator initialized with Unix timestamps between May 1997 and April 1998. Bounty organizer Filippo Valsorda independently verified the reconstruction. The work addresses a longstanding question about seeds the NSA generated for elliptic curves standardized by NIST in 2000. Consistently zero top bits pointed to lrand48’s 31-bit output, and Claude used LLL lattice reduction to recover generator states. Anthropic said the finding makes deliberate backdoors less likely; Qbit characterized it more strongly as showing the curves have no potential security vulnerabilities. Some skipped candidate curves, the B-163 seed and certain curve base points remain unexplained.

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