Claude cracked a 25-year-old riddle in a common encryption standard.
Anthropic said Friday that Claude found where the starting numbers behind widely used encryption curves came from. They came from an ordinary 1990s random number generator set by the clock, not a secret phrase. Cryptographer Filippo Valsorda checked the result and paid his bounty, which goes to the charity behind Let's Encrypt.
Why it mattersFor decades some experts feared the NSA had hidden a backdoor in these numbers. The finding makes that much less likely, so the encryption protecting your logins needs no change.
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