ellipticcurve

Anthropic's Claude AI model traced the five NSA-provided seeds used to generate NIST elliptic-curve parameters to a simple random-number generator, lrand48, fed with timestamps from 1997 and 1998. In less than half an hour the model reproduced the seed for the widely used P-256 curve, finding an exact match at the 1,842nd candidate. The result suggests the numbers were not chosen to hide a backdoor, reducing concerns about a secret NSA weakness in the curves. Bitcoin's secp256k1 curve was never part of this mystery and remains unaffected, though sufficiently powerful quantum computers could still pose a future threat.

#NSA #EllipticCurve #ClaudeAI