❯ Claude traces the origin of NIST’s elliptic-curve seeds in under half an hour, further weakening backdoor suspicions

A two-decade puzzleAnthropic said an internal research model found, in under half an hour, where the seeds for NIST’s five prime curves, P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521, came from. The curves are widely used for ECDSA digital signatures, and the unexplained origin of their seeds had long fueled suspicion of a hidden backdoor.

An old random-number functionThe seeds came from the C library’s lrand48 pseudorandom generator, initialized with Unix timestamps between May 1997 and April 1998. The model also explained four binary-curve seeds and the base points of six ANSI X9.62 example curves. The employee who prompted it gave no hint from earlier work.

Clearing, not crackingAnthropic stresses this is not a break of ECDSA and offers no new attack; it makes a planted backdoor less plausible. The B-163 seed, most base points and why some candidate seeds were skipped remain unexplained. The $36,864 bounty for finding the seeds will go to the Internet Security Research Group.

▮ SIGNALLarge models’ first real mark on cryptographic history is helping clear a standard the whole world relies on.