Claude Traces NIST Cryptography Seeds To An Old Random-Number Generator

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure An unusual piece of cryptography history has gained an answer. Anthropic says Claude reconstructed how the original seed values behind several widely used NIST elliptic curves were generated, resolving a question that had attracted suspicion for more than two decades. TL;DR: Claude identified a process involving the C library’s lrand48 generator and Unix timestamps. Anthropic stresses that the research does not reveal an attack on P-256 or other affected curves. The seeds have mattered because the standards published their values without a convincing public account of how the numbers were chosen. The U.S. National Security Agency had supplied them, leaving generations of researchers to ask whether a secret selection method could hide some mathematical advantage. Anthropic reports that a model worked backward from the published values and found an ordinary pseudorandom generation procedure. In the case of P-256, it took 1,842 iterations through candidate outputs to reproduce the standardized seed. The work also examined P-192, P-224, P-384 and P-521. This is interesting to crypto user...