Who would have thought that a puzzle that had puzzled the cryptography community for over 25 years would be solved by AI in under 30 minutes? 🔐
Anthropic just revealed that Claude uncovered the true origins of the “seeds” for several NIST elliptic curves.
🔹 The five curves involved are P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384, and P-521. They were added to the ECDSA signature standard in 2000 and are used in TLS certificates, SSH, and more.
🔹 Back then, only the seed values were published, with no explanation of how they were generated. Speculation over whether they concealed a backdoor has raged for more than two decades.
🔹 Claude’s answer: they weren’t hashes of some secret phrase, but outputs from lrand48, an old random number generator in 1990s C libraries, initialized with Unix timestamps from 1997–1998. All five seeds were reproduced.
The key point: this isn’t a crack, and it doesn’t weaken the security of these curves. On the contrary, making the seeds’ origins reproducible makes the claim that someone “deliberately planted a backdoor” much harder to defend.
For the crypto world, Bitcoin and Ethereum use secp256k1, which isn’t one of these five curves in the first place. What’s really worth thinking about is something else: AI is now digging through old records and spotting patterns so quickly that it’s a little unsettling.
Do you think AI will first become an ally in cryptographic security—or a new threat? 👇
#AI和半导体股本周市值损失超1万亿美元 #BTC #ETH
Anthropic just revealed that Claude uncovered the true origins of the “seeds” for several NIST elliptic curves.
🔹 The five curves involved are P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384, and P-521. They were added to the ECDSA signature standard in 2000 and are used in TLS certificates, SSH, and more.
🔹 Back then, only the seed values were published, with no explanation of how they were generated. Speculation over whether they concealed a backdoor has raged for more than two decades.
🔹 Claude’s answer: they weren’t hashes of some secret phrase, but outputs from lrand48, an old random number generator in 1990s C libraries, initialized with Unix timestamps from 1997–1998. All five seeds were reproduced.
The key point: this isn’t a crack, and it doesn’t weaken the security of these curves. On the contrary, making the seeds’ origins reproducible makes the claim that someone “deliberately planted a backdoor” much harder to defend.
For the crypto world, Bitcoin and Ethereum use secp256k1, which isn’t one of these five curves in the first place. What’s really worth thinking about is something else: AI is now digging through old records and spotting patterns so quickly that it’s a little unsettling.
Do you think AI will first become an ally in cryptographic security—or a new threat? 👇
#AI和半导体股本周市值损失超1万亿美元 #BTC #ETH