Claude solves a 25-year-old encryption mystery

Corrected 19 Oct: we fixed details of this story after checking the source again.

What happened

Claude traced the secret seeds behind NIST's ECDSA curves to a random number tool, not an NSA backdoor.

Why it matters to you

The locks guarding your logins and payments look safe after all.

Key number: 25 years: the curve seeds were published unexplained in 2000

Sources

• Anthropic
• techmeme.com