Anthropic 的 Claude 用不到 30 分钟破解 NSA 悬置 25 年的密码学谜题

Anthropics' Claude cracks a 25-year-old NSA cryptography mystery in under 30 minutes

文章要点

1Anthropic 称 Claude 用不到 30 分钟破解了 NSA 提供的 ECDSA 种子来源之谜
2种子出自随机数生成器 lrand48，用 1997 至 1998 年间的 Unix 时间戳初始化
3Claude 靠发现 lrand48 只输出 31 位、部分种子高位恒为零而识别出规律
4Anthropic 称后门可能性因此降低，36,864 美元赏金捐给安全研究组织

决策要点

Claude 破解种子之谜展示大模型在安全研究中的实用价值，也削弱了 ECDSA 标准暗藏后门的长期猜疑。

影响：ECDSA 是使用最广的椭圆曲线签名框架，后门疑虑降低有助于维持对现有签名体系的信任；大模型可承担安全审计中参数溯源类工作。
参考：可考虑让安全团队用大模型试点参数溯源、遗留实现分析等任务并记录耗时；值得在密码算法合规评估中更新对 ECDSA 种子疑虑的风险记录。
依据：破解方法与后门结论均出自 Anthropic 口径，暂无独立验证；ECDSA 于 2000 年标准化、种子由 NSA 提供且无解释为背景事实。

正文

Oct 17, 2026

Anthropic's AI Claude has solved a 25-year-old cryptography mystery. NIST standardized several curves in the ECDSA standard, the most widely used framework for elliptic-curve digital signatures, back in 2000. The NSA had supplied the seeds, the starting values used to generate the curve parameters, with zero explanation. No one knew how they were created, and that fueled suspicion of possible backdoors. The mystery even attracted a bounty and amateur sleuthing efforts. The late NSA employee Jerry Solinas had suggested the seeds were a hash of a humorous phrase, but that turned out to be wrong.

Claude cracked it in under 30 minutes. The seeds came from "lrand48," a simple C random number generator, initialized with a Unix timestamp between May 1997 and April 1998. Claude spotted the pattern because "lrand48" only outputs 31 bits, and the top bits in some seeds were systematically zero. According to Anthropic, this makes deliberate backdoors less likely. Anthropic is donating the $36,864 bounty to the Internet Security Research Group.

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