Anthropic says Claude solved 25-year NSA encryption seed mystery

Key points

• Claude recovered the seeds in under 30 minutes, according to Anthropic research published 16 Oct.
• The seeds trace to lrand48 starting values matching Unix timestamps between May 1997 and April 1998.
• The $36,864 bounty went to the Internet Security Research Group, while the B-163 seed remains unresolved.

Anthropic says its Claude AI solved a 25-year NSA encryption seed mystery, tracing five elliptic-curve seeds to an ordinary Unix-era random-number generator and timestamps from 1997 and 1998. The company published the research on 16 Oct, reporting that the work took under 30 minutes.

The five curves, P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521, were built from 160-bit seeds supplied by the National Security Agency and later published by NIST. Because nobody could explain how the numbers were chosen, cryptographers long suspected a hidden backdoor. A 2015 paper by Neal Koblitz and Alfred Menezes examined the controversy without demonstrating one.

The recovered starting values matched dates from 18 May 1997 to 3 April 1998. Cryptographer Filippo Valsorda, who offered a $12,288 bounty in October 2023, independently reproduced the results in Go.

Anthropic directed the matched $36,864 payout to the Internet Security Research Group, which runs Let's Encrypt. Bitcoin developer Gregory Maxwell said on Hackernews that a friend's AI agent had tried the same puzzle on 20 Sept without success, and questioned whether model capabilities had been restricted. The findings do not affect Bitcoin or Ethereum, which use secp256k1.

What to watch: Researchers have yet to explain why some acceptable candidates were discarded, and the origin of the B-163 seed remains unresolved.

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