Claude cracks the 27-year-old mystery of the NIST curve seeds: "It's just timestamps"

Anthropic's Claude worked out in under half an hour how the seeds behind NIST's ECDSA elliptic curves were generated.

According to an Anthropic Frontier Red Team post on Oct 16, the seeds for P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 came from the 1990s C library random number generator lrand48, seeded with Unix timestamps from May 1997 to April 1998. No hash was involved. The P-256 seed was candidate 1,842 of its run.

The NSA supplied the seeds without explanation, feeding long-running suspicion of a backdoor. The leading story, that the late NSA researcher Jerry Solinas hashed a joke phrase like "Give Bob and Jerry a raise," turned out to be wrong. Anthropic said the finding is not a break or a new attack and makes it more confident the curves have no backdoor. The $36,864 bounty for finding the seeds will go to the Internet Security Research Group.

Anthropic researcher Steve Weis's post "CLAUDE FOUND THE SEEDS" passed 3,200 likes and 740,000 views on X. "13 years of tinfoil hats for srand48(time(NULL))," he added.