Anthropic’s AI model, Claude, has solved a 25-year-old cryptographic mystery by tracing five unexplained seeds for NIST elliptic curves back to an ordinary random-number generator using timestamps from 1997 and 1998. The discovery, which took less than 30 minutes, reduces the likelihood of a hidden NSA backdoor in the curves but leaves some questions unanswered about how certain elements were selected.
The seeds in question were provided by the National Security Agency (NSA) to the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the late 1990s. The secrecy surrounding their origin fueled long-standing suspicions that the NSA had embedded a backdoor in the cryptographic standards. The mystery deepened after the Snowden disclosures revealed the NSA’s efforts to weaken cryptographic standards.
Claude’s breakthrough came when it traced the seeds to lrand48, a random-number generator found in older C software libraries. The model reproduced the sequence behind P-256, a widely used curve, and found an exact match for its published seed at the 1,842nd candidate. This finding allows anyone to rerun the program and retrace the path to the published numbers, making a hidden weakness much less likely.
Bitcoin was not affected by this discovery because it uses secp256k1, a simpler curve with little room to conceal a weakness. However, sufficiently powerful quantum computers could pose a separate threat to Bitcoin in the future. Anthropic noted that users of the NIST curves do not need to take any action following this discovery.