‘Wow, it’s a real discovery’: Claude cracks a 25-year NSA number mystery
The AI model Claude successfully solved a 25-year-old cryptographic mystery regarding the origin of NSA-supplied elliptic-curve seeds. This discovery helps clarify long-standing suspicions about potential backdoors in cryptographic standards used for internet security.
Why it matters
This demonstrates the practical utility of large language models in solving complex historical and mathematical problems that have eluded human researchers for decades.
It took the model just about half an hour to come up with a solution — one that cryptographers had been chasing to answer for 25 years.
Much of the internet relies on elliptic-curve cryptography, the family of mathematics that is also used to protect bitcoin wallets. It lets someone prove they hold a secret key without revealing the details of the key itself.
Think of the curve as a lock design anyone can inspect. Each person using it has their own secret key, but everyone relies on the design being difficult to break.
But who chose the mathematics everyone would trust?
In 2000, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, adopted a set of curves supplied by the National Security Agency. The NSA provided those designs without explaining where some of the numbers used to generate them came from.
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