Claude traces the origin of a 25-year-old puzzle in a widely used security standard
The Decoder reports that Anthropic's Claude found, in under 30 minutes, how the starting numbers of a 25-year-old security puzzle were made.
In 2000, the US standards agency NIST approved math curves for digital signatures. These help prove a file or message is real. The NSA supplied the starting numbers, called seeds, and did not explain them. Some people feared a hidden weakness, called a backdoor.
The Decoder reports that Claude worked out the answer in under half an hour. The seeds came from lrand48, a basic random-number program. It was started with a clock reading from between May 1997 and April 1998. Claude noticed that the leading digits of some seeds were always zero. That fits how the program works.
The late NSA employee Jerry Solinas had hinted at a joke phrase as the source. That was wrong. Anthropic says the finding makes deliberate backdoors less likely. It is giving the $36,864 bounty to the Internet Security Research Group.
From the sourceRead the original at The Decoder →A puzzle that drew a cash bounty and years of amateur sleuthing was solved by an AI in under half an hour. The Internet Security Research Group gains the $36,864 bounty, and Anthropic says the answer weakens the backdoor theory.
The facts
- NIST standardized several curves in the ECDSA digital-signature standard in 2000, and the NSA supplied the seeds with no explanation.
- The late NSA employee Jerry Solinas had suggested the seeds were a hash of a humorous phrase, which turned out to be wrong.
- The Decoder reports that Claude solved the mystery in less than 30 minutes.
- The seeds were made with lrand48, a basic C random number generator, started from a Unix timestamp between May 1997 and April 1998.
- Claude spotted the pattern because lrand48 outputs only 31 bits and the top bits in some seeds were systematically zero.
- According to Anthropic, the finding makes deliberate backdoors less likely.
- Anthropic is donating the $36,864 bounty to the Internet Security Research Group.
Sources
- The Decoder: Anthropics' Claude cracks a 25-year-old NSA cryptography mystery in under 30 minutes
Published
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