Anthropic's Claude research model has solved a 25-year-old mystery regarding the origin of seeds used in five NIST elliptic curves. The model determined that the seeds for P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384, and P-521 were not derived from a secret hash or passphrase, as previously speculated. Instead, they were generated by the C library's lrand48 pseudorandom number generator, initialized with Unix timestamps between May 1997 and April 1998. This finding, which Anthropic's Frontier Red Team reported, addresses long-standing concerns about potential backdoors in the widely used cryptographic standards, though Anthropic emphasizes it does not indicate a break in ECDSA or a weakness in the curves themselves. The team has published reproduction code, and cryptographer Filippo Valsorda confirmed the findings, leading to a $36,864 donation to the Internet Security Research Group. AI
IMPACT Removes a significant source of suspicion regarding potential backdoors in widely used cryptographic standards.
RANK_REASON AI model solves a long-standing cryptographic mystery, with independent verification and a bounty claim. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]
Read on dev.to — Anthropic tag →
- Anthropic
- Arjen K. Lenstra
- Claude
- elliptic curve cryptography
- Filippo Valsorda
- Internet Security Research Group
- Jerome A. Solinas
- NIST
- NSA
- P-384
- P-521
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