🤖 Claude solves a 25-year-old cryptography mystery in under 30 minutes

For decades, researchers questioned how the NSA chose the parameters behind widely used elliptic-curve cryptography standards. Anthropic says Claude has now uncovered a key part of the answer.

The model traced the origins of five NIST curves, including P-256, to a 1990s pseudorandom number generator seeded with Unix timestamps. Instead of breaking the encryption, Claude reconstructed how the original parameters were generated, helping address long-standing concerns about potential hidden backdoors.

Claude also identified how the base points of six related curves were generated, although several other curves remain unexplained.

Importantly, Anthropic says this is not a cryptographic break and does not mean existing systems need to change. The findings actually make deliberate backdoors less plausible, though some questions remain.

The amazing part is how quickly AI helped solve a problem that had resisted researchers for d…

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