THE CRUNCH

A 25-year-old cryptography puzzle has reportedly been solved by Anthropic's Claude in under 30 minutes. The mystery dates back to 2000, when NIST standardised several curves in ECDSA, the most widely used framework for elliptic-curve digital signatures. The NSA supplied the seeds, the starting values used to generate the curve parameters, with no explanation of how they were chosen. That silence fuelled years of suspicion that the curves might contain deliberate backdoors, and even attracted a bounty and amateur sleuthing.

The answer, according to Anthropic, is mundane. The late NSA employee Jerry Solinas had suggested the seeds were a hash of a humorous phrase, but that turned out to be wrong. Claude found they came from "lrand48", a simple C random number generator, initialised with a Unix timestamp between May 1997 and April 1998. The AI spotted the pattern because lrand48 only outputs 31 bits, leaving the top bits in some seeds systematically zero.

Anthropic says the finding makes deliberate backdoors less likely, since the seeds appear to have an ordinary technical origin rather than a hidden design. The $36,864 bounty attached to the puzzle is being donated to the Internet Security Research Group.