Claude Cracks 25-Year-Old NSA Elliptic Curve Puzzle in Half an Hour, Greatly Reducing Encryption Backdoor Concerns

Odaily Report: In under 30 minutes, the AI model Claude cracked a puzzle that had baffled the cryptography community for roughly 25 years regarding the origins of the US National Security Agency's (NSA) elliptic curve parameters, tracing the elliptic curve seeds adopted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2000 back to an older random number generation program used between 1997 and 1998.

Claude found that five sets of NIST elliptic curve seeds were related to the lrand48 random number generator in an older C language software library, and among the 1,842nd candidate result, it found a value that exactly matched the seed of the widely used P-256 curve, successfully reproducing its generation process.

Previously, because the NSA had long failed to explain the source of the relevant parameters, there had been persistent suspicions that an encryption backdoor might exist. Anthropic stated that this discovery greatly reduces the likelihood that the relevant parameters were deliberately implanted with weaknesses, and that existing NIST elliptic curve users need not take additional measures.

In addition, Bitcoin uses a different elliptic curve, secp256k1, and is not affected by this incident. The related research bounty of $36,864 will be donated to the Internet Security Research Group, the nonprofit behind Let's Encrypt.