‘Wow, it’s a real discovery’: Claude cracks a 25-year NSA number mystery
Source: CoinDesk ·
From the source
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…