Claude Solved a 25-Year NSA Mystery in 30 Minutes: The Curve Seeds Came From a Clock
Anthropic said on October 16 that an internal Claude research model solved, in under half an hour, a cryptography mystery that had stood for 25 years. The seeds behind the NIST elliptic curves P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 — numbers the NSA supplied in the late 1990s with no explanation of where they came from — were not hashes of a secret phrase and, on this evidence, were not chosen to hide a weakness. They were output from lrand48, the random-number generator in old C libraries, seeded with a Unix timestamp.
