Anthropic · Claude · Circle · NIST · Bitcoin · CoinDesk
One promising lead suggested the numbers came from a humorous phrase Solinas had forgotten
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In 2023, cryptography engineer Filippo Valsorda and other contributors offered a $12,288 bounty for an answer, rising to over $36,000 if the winner donated it to charity.
Key facts
- In 2023, cryptography engineer Filippo Valsorda and other contributors offered a $12,288 bounty for an answer, rising to over $36,000 if the winner donated it to charity
- Cryptographers Neal Koblitz and Alfred Menezes examined the controversy in their 2015 paper, “A Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma
- Diversified RWA stablecoins sustain 5-7% yield from real credit as crypto funding compresses to ~4%
- An Anthropic AI model has cracked one of cryptography’s longest-running whodunits, tracing numbers the NSA handed to the U.S. government in the late 1990s, which were long suspected of hiding
Summary
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.