Anthropic's Claude AI has resolved a 25-year-old mystery surrounding the origin of NIST's cryptographic seeds. These seeds, used in elliptic curve cryptography (ECDSA), were provided by the NSA without explanation, leading to suspicions of a backdoor. Claude determined that the seeds were generated by a common pseudo-random number generator from the 1990s, initialized with Unix timestamps from 1997-1998. This discovery, while significant, does not indicate a cryptographic break or necessitate changes to current security practices. AI
IMPACT Resolves a significant cryptographic mystery, enhancing trust in digital security without requiring immediate changes to existing systems.
RANK_REASON AI model resolves a long-standing cryptographic mystery by identifying the origin of NIST seeds. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]
Read on dev.to — Anthropic tag →
- ANSI X9.62-1998: Public Key Cryptography for the Financial Services Industry: the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA)
- Anthropic
- Bob Reiter
- Claude
- elliptic curve cryptography
- Filippo Valsorda
- FIPS 186-2
- Jerome A. Solinas
- NIST
- NSA
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