Claude Solved the NSA's 25-Year-Old Mystery. I Checked the Code.

In 1997, an NSA mathematician handed over five numbers that define the NIST elliptic curves, including P-256, which still runs in web certificates and passkeys today. For more than 25 years nobody could reproduce them. On October 16, 2026, Anthropic said an internal Claude model worked out how they were made in under half an hour. The answer wasn't a hashed sentence. It was the C library's lrand48 random number generator, seeded with the computer's clock. In this video: • The NSA emails: Jerry Solinas to Daniel Bernstein ("Greetings from evil Jerry", "a humorous message", "the Ark of the Covenant") • The bounty: $12,288, tripled to $36,864 for charity, and why the phrase hunt failed • The three clues: one stuck bit, a generator that runs backwards, and a clock (P-256: Aug 16, 1997, 01:52:34 UTC, candidate #1,842) • We ran Anthropic's code ourselves: 14/14 seeds; all five NIST seeds match FIPS 186-2 and its SHA-1 check • Who said what: Steve Weis, Thomas Ptacek, Filippo Valsorda, Matthew Green, Yehuda Lindell, David Wong, Alfred Menezes and more • The skeptics: skipped candidates, unexplained base points, about 30 bits of freedom, and "no evidence of innocence" • One more NSA secret: Skipjack's S-box and srand48(48571). 173 of 256 values match Sources: • Anthropic, "Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins" (Oct 16, 2026): https://www.anthropic.com/research/ec... • Filippo Valsorda, the bounty claimed: https://words.filippo.io/seeds-solved/ • Filippo Valsorda, the 2023 bounty: https://words.filippo.io/seeds-bounty/ • Steve Weis, how were the NIST curve parameters generated: https://saweis.net/posts/nist-curve-s... • Bernstein & Lange, Safe curves (2024), Solinas emails in Appendix C: https://cr.yp.to/papers/safecurves-20... • Koblitz & Menezes, A Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma: https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1018 • FIPS 186-2: https://csrc.nist.gov/files/pubs/fips... • Filippo's Go reimplementation: https://github.com/FiloSottile/mostly... • Skipjack check: https://github.com/dadrian/crypto-con... • Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=... • Steve Weis on X: https://x.com/sweis/status/2111165738... Voice excerpts (short, for commentary): • Alfred Menezes, Cryptography 101 lecture "V8c: Elliptic curve cryptography" (2024):    • V8c: Elliptic curve cryptography (Applied ...   • Daniel J. Bernstein, "How to manipulate standards", TU Eindhoven (2015): https://projectbullrun.org/surveillan... • Bruce Schneier with Eben Moglen, Columbia Law School / SFLC (2013), CC BY-SA 3.0 US: https://softwarefreedom.org/events/20... • Tanja Lange, 30C3 "The Year in Crypto" (2013), CC BY 3.0 DE: https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5339_-_... • Steve Weis on Security Cryptography Whatever (2023): https://securitycryptographywhatever.... • Filippo Valsorda on Go Time episode 295 (2023): https://changelog.com/gotime/295 Chapters: 0:00 A number from the NSA 1:12 What the seed is for 2:33 Why people doubted it 4:38 The NSA emails 5:56 The search that failed 7:02 The $12,288 bounty 8:00 Half an hour 8:52 Clue 1: one stuck bit 9:37 Clue 2: the lattice 10:09 Clue 3: a clock 11:29 "Am I in a test?" 12:03 We ran the code 12:54 Who said what 14:33 Open questions 15:24 Was there a backdoor? 16:51 The criticism 17:38 One more NSA secret: Skipjack 18:36 What it means More from Novaki:    / @novaki_ai   Subscribe:    / @novaki_ai   The narration uses an AI voice (ElevenLabs). This video is not sponsored. Screenshots and short voice excerpts are used for commentary and credited on screen. Website: https://novaki.lol X: https://x.com/Novaki_ai Instagram:   / novaki_ai   Contact: hello@novaki.lol #Claude #NSA #Cryptography