Claude model traces the origins of NIST curve seeds, closing a 26-year crypto mystery

Anthropic announced in a blog post that its internal research Claude model traced the origins of the seeds behind five NIST standard elliptic curves in under 30 minutes, offering a reproducible answer to a crypto mystery that has lasted about 26 years.

These curves joined the US digital signature standard in 2000. The seeds came from the NSA with no explanation of how they were made, which fueled backdoor suspicions for years. Claude found the seeds came from lrand48, a random number generator in C libraries, initialized with Unix timestamps.

By spotting bit patterns, rebuilding the generator's state and working backwards, the model pinned the creation time to 1997 and 1998. The P-256 seed matched the 1,842nd candidate from a run on August 16, 1997. The team has shared the reproduction code.

Anthropic stressed this is not breaking the signature algorithm and no new attacks were found. Instead, it lowers concerns that the parameters hid a deliberate backdoor, and users need not take action.