Claude AI Solves 25-Year NSA Cryptography Mystery in Just 30 Minutes
Anthropic’s Claude traced NIST curve seeds to a 1990s C random generator, not hidden NSA backdoors.
Anthropic says an internal Claude research model traced the published seeds for NIST curves P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 to lrand48, an older C library generator, in under 30 minutes. The seeds match runs initialized with Unix timestamps between May 1997 and April 1998; P-256 was the 1,842nd candidate from a run started on 16 August 1997. Five ANSI X9.62 example seeds fit the same construction, and some base points were linked to FreeLIP. Anthropic says this is not a cryptographic break, private keys were not recovered, and no changes to deployed systems are warranted, though B-163 and several base points remain unexplained.
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