CLAUDE CRACKED THE NSA'S 25-YEAR CRYPTO MYSTERY — IN 30 MINUTES — THERE WAS NEVER A BACKDOOR

An Anthropic research model has traced the unexplained seed values behind five NIST elliptic curves, supplied by the National Security Agency in the late 1990s, to an ordinary random-number generator fed with timestamps from 1997 and 1998. The model reached the answer in under 30 minutes, ending a 25-year-old question that had fueled suspicion the NSA had chosen the numbers to hide a backdoor only it could exploit.

Claude reproduced the sequence behind the widely used P-256 curve and matched its published seed at the 1,842nd candidate generated by lrand48, a generator from older C libraries. Anthropic says anyone can now rerun the program and get the same numbers, which makes a hidden weakness much less likely, and that users of the NIST curves do not need to take action. Bitcoin was not affected, since it uses the simpler secp256k1 curve. The $36,864 bounty for solving the mystery will go to the Internet Security Research Group, the nonprofit behind Let's Encrypt.