Claude traces NIST ECDSA curve seeds to a Unix-timestamp PRNG, closing a 26-year mystery
Anthropic says an internal research Claude model needed under half an hour to trace the origins of the “seeds” behind five NIST standard elliptic curves (P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521): rather than any hash algorithm, they are outputs of the 1990s C library pseudorandom generator lrand48, initialized with Unix timestamps. By spotting bit patterns with cleared top bits and recovering the generator state with LLL lattice reduction, Claude dated the seeds to runs between May 1997 and April 1998, with the P-256 seed being candidate 1,842 in its run. Claude also found that some base points came from Arjen Lenstra's FreeLIP long-integer package (early NTL shipped the same code), using small integer seeds such as 20000 for P-192. Anthropic stresses this is not a cryptographic break and no new attack, and that it makes deliberate backdoors in the parameters less plausible, so users need take no action; reproduction code has been published and the $36,864 seed bounty goes to the Internet Security Research Group.
It is a rare concrete case of a frontier model resolving a genuine long-standing open question, a modest signal of AI's usefulness in basic cryptography and mathematics research.