Claude Solves 25-Year Cryptography Puzzle, Bitcoin Chooses secp256k1 Curve

On October 17, Anthropic revealed that its model Claude solved the NIST standard elliptic curve seed generation mystery, which has troubled the cryptography community for about 25 years, in less than half an hour. This discovery is closely related to the underlying security design of cryptocurrencies. ECDSA is a widely used cryptographic standard for digital signatures, supporting wallet signatures and identity verification for a large number of crypto assets. Some parameters of the NIST standard elliptic curve were provided by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States, but the seed generation process has long been opaque, raising speculation about potential backdoors. Claude discovered through reverse analysis that the relevant seed may have been generated by the lrand48 pseudo-random number generator from the C language library of the 1990s, combined with Unix timestamps, rather than a complex secret algorithm. This provides a new explanation for the source of the parameters. Bitcoin chose the secp256k1 curve due to security concerns, rather than the commonly used standard curves from NIST. This choice is often discussed in the context of a lack of transparency in the standard-setting process, but it cannot be simply concluded that its sole motivation is to avoid NSA backdoors. It is important to emphasize that Claude cracked the generation method of some standard curve parameters, not the ECDSA itself, and no new mathematical vulnerabilities were found in the related curves. The restoration of the parameter generation process helps assess backdoor speculations but does not prove that all related implementations are risk-free. This test demonstrates the potential of AI in the cryptography industry, which could change the landscape of cryptographic offense and defense, audit historical cryptographic designs, test security assumptions, and provide new security research tools for cryptographic infrastructure.

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