Claude cracks a 25-year cryptography puzzle in half an hour, why didn't Bitcoin use this curve?

BlockBeats news, October 17 - Anthropic today disclosed that its internal model Claude cracked the mystery of the seed generation for the NIST standard elliptic curves, which has puzzled the cryptography community for about 25 years, in less than half an hour. This discovery is also closely related to the underlying security design of cryptocurrencies.

ECDSA is a cryptographic standard widely used for digital signatures, and related technologies support wallet signing and identity verification for a large number of crypto assets. Around 2000, some parameters of the NIST standard elliptic curves were provided by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), but the seed generation process remained opaque for a long time, sparking speculation about potential backdoors.

Through reverse analysis, Claude found that the relevant seeds were likely generated by the pseudo-random number generator lrand48 in C language libraries from the 1990s, combined with Unix timestamps, rather than from a complex, carefully designed secret algorithm. This provides a new explanation for the long-unresolved question of the parameters' origin.

Bitcoin chose a different path due to security concerns: Satoshi Nakamoto adopted the secp256k1 curve rather than the standard curves commonly used by NIST. This choice is often discussed in the context of the lack of transparency in the standards-setting process, but it cannot simply be concluded that its sole motive was to avoid an NSA backdoor.

It should be emphasized that what Claude cracked was the generation method of some standard curve parameters, not ECDSA itself, nor did it discover new mathematical vulnerabilities in the relevant curves. Reconstructing the parameter generation process helps assess backdoor speculation, but it does not equal a thorough proof that all related implementations are free of risk.

This test also demonstrates another side of AI in the crypto industry: it may not only change the landscape of cryptographic offense and defense, but can also be used to audit historical cryptographic designs, test security assumptions, and provide new security research tools for crypto infrastructure.