Claude Cracks 25-Year-Old NSA Crypto Mystery in Under 30 Minutes
The Decoder · rss · 2026-10-17
Anthropic's Claude solved a 25-year-old cryptography puzzle in under 30 minutes: the unexplained "seeds" behind NIST's standard elliptic curves for digital signatures, provided by the NSA and long suspected of hiding deliberate backdoors.
Claude determined the seeds came from lrand48, a simple C random number generator — meaning they were ordinary randomness rather than a planted trapdoor, significantly undermining the long-standing backdoor conspiracy theory.
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