‘Wow, it’s a real discovery’: Claude cracks a 25-year NSA number mystery
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.
Make preferred on
Ibahagi ang artikulong ito
Buod
- 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.
