Anthropic’s AI model Claude solved a twenty-five-year-old cryptographic mystery by identifying the origin of specific seeds used in the ECDSA standard. The National Security Agency provided these starting values in the year 2000 without explanation, leading to long-standing suspicion of hidden backdoors. While an employee named Jerry Solinas previously suggested the values were a hash of a joke, that theory proved incorrect. Claude determined the seeds came from a simple C random number generator called lrand48. The system only outputs thirty-one bits and the model noticed that the top bits in several seeds were consistently zero. This pattern matched a Unix timestamp recorded between May 1997 and April 1998.
The solution matters because it clarifies the design of a widely used digital signature framework without confirming malicious intent. Anthropic states that the systematic zeroing of bits makes deliberate backdoors less likely than random errors. The company donated the $36,864 bounty to the Internet Security Research Group.
* The seeds originated from a standard Unix timestamp.
* The lrand48 generator has a thirty-one bit limit.
* Anthropic confirmed no evidence of a backdoor exists.
