Claude cracks 25-year-old NSA cryptography puzzle
What happened
On 17 October 2026, The Decoder reported that Anthropic's Claude cracked a 25-year-old cryptography puzzle in under 30 minutes. According to the report, the puzzle concerns the seeds of ECDSA curves standardised by NIST in 2000, which were supplied by the NSA without explanation. Claude found that the seeds came from the C random number generator lrand48, initialised with Unix timestamps between May 1997 and April 1998. Progress is limited to this finding itself, and the report does not mention any response from NIST or the NSA.
Written by AI from the reports · updated 3 h ago
Timeline
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- The DecoderAnthropics' Claude cracks a 25-year-old NSA cryptography mystery in under 30 minutes
Anthropic's AI model Claude has solved a 25-year-old cryptography puzzle. The mysterious seeds behind NIST's standard curves for digital signatures were provided by the NSA without explanation, raising long-standing suspicion about built-in backdoors. Claude figured out in under 30 minutes that the seeds came from "lrand48," a simple C random number generator, making deliberate backdoors far less likely.
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