[Claude Solves NSA Elliptic Curve Mystery of 25 Years in Half an Hour, Significantly Reducing Concerns Over Encryption Backdoors] Odaily Planet Daily News: The AI model Claude cracked a mystery that has puzzled the cryptography community for approximately 25 years in less than 30 minutes. The mystery pertains to the source of the elliptic curve parameters used by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Claude traced the seeds of the elliptic curves adopted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2000 back to an older random number generation program used between 1997 and 1998. Claude discovered that five sets of NIST elliptic curve seeds are related to the `lrand48` random number generator in an older C language software library. Among the 1,842 candidate results, Claude identified a value that perfectly matches the widely used P-256 curve seed, successfully reproducing its generation process. Previously, due to the NSA's long-standing lack of explanation regarding the source of these parameters, there were suspicions that encryption backdoors might have been intentionally embedded. Anthropic stated that this discovery significantly reduces the likelihood of deliberate weaknesses being introduced into these parameters, and existing NIST elliptic curve users do not need to take additional measures. Furthermore, Bitcoin uses a different elliptic curve, secp256k1, and is unaffected by this incident. The $36,864 research bounty associated with this discovery will be donated to the nonprofit organization Internet Security Research Group, which is behind Let's Encrypt.