According to The Decoder, Anthropic's AI model Claude has solved a cryptography puzzle that had been open for 25 years. It concerned the seeds of the NIST standard curves for digital signatures. The NSA had once supplied them without any explanation.
What the seeds were about
Digital signatures often rely on elliptic curves. These are mathematical structures whose parameters must be fixed in advance so that all parties follow the same rules. A seed is a starting value. The parameters of a curve are supposed to be derivable from it in a traceable way, so that the curve does not look as if it was chosen for a specific purpose.
For the NIST standard curves, exactly this explanation was missing. Nobody could say where the starting values came from. For a long time, this fueled the suspicion that the NSA might have chosen curves with a built-in weakness, in other words a backdoor. This could never be proven, but it could not be ruled out either.
The result
According to the report, the seeds come from "lrand48", a simple random number generator of the C programming language. Claude reportedly needed less than 30 minutes for this. The long-standing suspicion of backdoors is thereby said to be refuted.
The origin in a simple, widely used generator is a mundane explanation. It does not fit the assumption that the values were built with great effort for a hidden purpose.
What readers can take away
The case shows how much trust in cryptography depends on traceability. Parameters without a documented origin arouse suspicion, even when they are harmless. At the same time, it shows that AI models can help in the search for such connections.
The report gives no details about Claude's approach. Anyone who wants to assess the claim for themselves should look for verifiable documentation and the assessment of independent experts.
