Anthropic's Claude cracks NSA's 25-year-old cryptography puzzle in under 30 minutes

Anthropic says its Claude solved the 25-year puzzle of the seed source for the ECDSA standard curves in under 30 minutes: the seeds were generated by the simple C random number generator lrand48, initialized with Unix timestamps between May 1997 and April 1998. When NIST standardized the ECDSA curves in 2000, the NSA provided these seeds without any explanation, which long fueled outside speculation about backdoors. Claude found that lrand48 outputs only 31 bits, and that the high-order bits of some seeds were systematically zero, thereby identifying the pattern. Anthropic says this makes a deliberate backdoor less likely, and donated the $36,864 bounty to the Internet Security Research Group.