Claude solves 25-year-old NSA enigma in just half an hour
The AI model Claude, made by Anthropic, has solved a cryptography mystery that began in 2000 in less than 30 minutes.
The discovery explains where certain numbers, called 'seeds', came from. The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) used these numbers to create secure elliptic curves in the FIPS 186-2 standard. This standard is an important part of the technology that protects much of the world's digital information through encryption.
For 25 years, no one had explained where these numbers came from. This led to many conspiracy theories. Experts and academics suspected that the United States National Security Agency (NSA) had deliberately chosen the numbers to create a secret weakness, known as a backdoor, that would let it spy on protected communications.
The most common theories suggested that the numbers were created by turning phrases into numbers or by using inside jokes made by the agency's mathematicians.
However, Claude's research found a much simpler explanation: the NSA used a fairly standard random number generator from that time, called the lrand48 function. This function was common in the C programming languages used during the 1990s. The NSA started the generator using the exact date and time shown on its computer's clock.
The mystery is solved
To find the answer, Anthropic's AI did not try to guess secret phrases. Instead, it studied the mathematical patterns in the published data and searched for patterns commonly found in software from the 1990s.
Within minutes, it found matching number sequences and worked backward through the algorithm to discover the exact times when the numbers had been generated. These times fell between May 1997 and April 1998. For example, in the P-256 security standard, one published value matched the 1,842nd attempt in a sequence that began on August 16, 1997.
Anthropic and independent experts have explained that this work is a reconstruction of what happened in the past and does not reveal a security weakness. The encryption has not been broken, and no private keys have been exposed. In fact, showing that the numbers came from a computer program using the system's clock, rather than from a deliberate attempt to weaken the mathematics behind the algorithm, greatly reduces the likelihood that the NSA added a secret way to spy on protected communications.
Claude's discovery has brought a technical challenge started by cryptographers in 2023 to an end. The $36,864 prize will be donated to the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group. Most importantly, one of the longest-running mysteries in cybersecurity history has finally been solved.