Anthropic announced that Claude solved a more-than-two-decade cryptography puzzle in half an hour

Anthropic published a research result: an employee gave Claude's internal research model a problem that had troubled the cryptography community for more than two decades, and Claude traced the seed sources of NIST's P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384, and P-521 in less than half an hour, without receiving the previously rumored passphrase clues. These seeds were generated by the weak pseudorandom number generator lrand48 from the C library, with the initial state taken from a Unix timestamp; Claude scanned 34 combinations of random number generators and truncation methods, identified the feature that some seed high-order bits were zero, then exhaustively searched the hidden bits and used the LLL algorithm to recover the generator's internal state, and traced that the base points of 6 curves including P-192 came from the random number generator of the big integer software package FreeLIP. Anthropic said this finding did not break ECDSA and did not introduce a new attack method, but it reduced the possibility that the relevant curves were deliberately backdoored; the seed of the B-163 curve and the base point generation method of some curves still have no identified source.