‘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.
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 a backdoor, to an ordinary random-number program fed with timestamps from 1997 and 1998.
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.
The secrecy became even harder to dismiss after the Snowden disclosures linked the NSA to efforts to weaken cryptographic standards. NIST later removed that tool, the Dual EC random-number generator, from its recommendations.
Those starting numbers, called seeds, were public. But the NSA never explained how it chose them, fueling years of suspicion that it had tested many alternatives until it found a curve with a weakness only it knew how to exploit. The tinfoil theory was that the NSA had a backdoor to every system that used it.
Cryptographers Neal Koblitz and Alfred Menezes examined the controversy in their 2015 paper, “A Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma.” Menezes had helped write the original standard and recalled receiving the seeds from NSA mathematician Jerry Solinas in 1997.
Security researcher Steve Weis spent years looking for an explanation, including filing public-records requests in 2018. NIST said it had no documentation, while the NSA stopped responding. One promising lead suggested the numbers came from a humorous phrase Solinas had forgotten, sending investigators searching through possible word combinations.
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. Solinas had died earlier that year, leaving researchers to work through old recollections and the numbers themselves to no outcome.