‘Wow, it’s a real discovery’: Claude cracks a 25-year NSA number mystery
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Numbers the spy agency handed over in the 1990s, long suspected of hiding a backdoor, turn out to have come from a basic computer program. Bitcoin was never on that list, and its quantum problem hasn’t gone anywhere.
An Anthropic AI model took less than 30 minutes to trace five unexplained seeds for NIST elliptic curves supplied by the National Security Agency to an ordinary random-number generator using timestamps from 1997 and 1998. The finding makes a hidden NSA backdoor less likely and does not require users of the NIST curves to take action, though questions remain about how some elements were selected.
Bitcoin was not affected because it uses secp256k1, a simpler curve with little room to conceal a weakness, although sufficiently powerful quantum computers could eventually pose a separate threat.
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© CoinDesk
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Numbers the spy agency handed over in the 1990s, long suspected of hiding a backdoor, turn out to have come from a basic computer program. Bitcoin was never on that list, and its quantum problem hasn’t gone anywhere.
An Anthropic AI model took less than 30 minutes to trace five unexplained seeds for NIST elliptic curves supplied by the National Security Agency to an ordinary random-number generator using timestamps from 1997 and 1998. The finding makes a hidden NSA backdoor less likely and does not require users of the NIST curves to take action, though questions remain about how some elements were selected.
Bitcoin was not affected because it uses secp256k1, a simpler curve with little room to conceal a weakness, although sufficiently powerful quantum computers could eventually pose a separate threat.
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© CoinDesk