🚨Claude just cracked the NSA's 26-year-old secret behind internet encryption. it took under half an hour. in 2000, the NSA gave the world the "random" numbers behind the NIST curves. P-256 is one of them, and it protects HTTPS, passkeys and payments today. nobody knew where those numbers came from. the NSA engineer behind them died in 2023. there was a $36,864 bounty for anyone who could explain them. here's what Claude did: > guessed they came from a 1990s C random number generator > wrote a scanner and tested 34 combinations > spotted a pattern with a 1 in 5,810 chance of being random > traced it to lrand48, seeded with Unix timestamps from 1997-98 the "mystery numbers" protecting the internet came from a basic random number generator and a clock. no backdoor found. the theory that the NSA weakened the curves just got a lot weaker. the bounty goes to the nonprofit behind Let's Encrypt.