Anthropic says an internal Claude model solved a 25-year cryptographic mystery on October 16 — the origin of the NIST seed values behind the ECDSA standard curves that secure most of the web. In…
AspireAI community · anthropic.com
Anthropic says an internal Claude model solved a 25-year cryptographic mystery on October 16 — the origin of the NIST seed values behind the ECDSA standard curves that secure most of the web. In under 30 minutes, Claude found the seeds were not the output of any hash at all: they came from a 1990s C-library random-number generator called lrand48, seeded with Unix timestamps. P-256 alone took 1842 iterations to spit out the documented 20-byte seed.
The takeaway: this is not a cryptographic break. Anthropic frames it as confirmation that the curves were chosen without backdoors — just a very simple clock-driven generator, which anyone can now reproduce. Anthropic released its scanner under CC0 so others can verify.
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Two critical PHP remote code execution flaws — one found by GPT-5.6 Sol — were patched on October 21, 2026, and OpenAI published a disclosure framework alongside the fix. Fixed versions: PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35. Both allow unauthenticated remote code execution, and PHP's advisory says risk is highest for mod_php, where a demonstrated exploit triggers before any application code runs. The CVEs are distinct failure modes. CVE-2026-109618 (OOM corruption): out-of-memory handling can interrupt PHP while internal request data is only partially initialized, and request cleanup may then treat the invalid data as valid. CVE-2026-109619 (stale global state): request-owned internal state can survive after its backing memory is freed, and a later request served by the same worker may use that stale state. OpenAI states GPT-5.6 Sol identified the first flaw through its Patch the Planet initiative, and that Wiz independently discovered and reported both vulnerabilities. PHP's maintainers led the fixes and release, with Wiz, Cloudflare and OpenAI contributing research and coordination. Wiz's write-up adds that it used GPT-5.6 Sol and Gemini 4 Argon throughout, with Gemini 4 Argon contributing to finding the vulnerability and validating the patch. OpenAI describes the gap between discovery and public exploitation as a "Defender's Window," proposes a five-stage response framework, and committed $1 billion in subsidised Daybreak model access for organizations with limited security resources. Honest caveats: these are OpenAI's and Wiz's own characterizations, and OpenAI also notes the same capabilities help attackers build offensive tooling faster. PHP 8.1 and older no longer receive updates from the PHP project.