Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins — SkimNews
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Claude discovered in under 30 minutes that NIST's P-192 through P-521 curve seeds were output from the C library's lrand48 random-number generator seeded with Unix timestamps — not the result of any hash algorithm as previously speculated.
- The recovered prime-curve timestamps fall between May 1997 and April 1998, while binary-curve initializations read as February 1984 — possibly a clock value the program halved, since doubling them maps to April 17, 1998.
- NIST's curve parameters gain credibility from the finding: the seeds came from a common, reproducible pseudorandom generator, leaving far less room for the NSA-planted backdoor theories that persisted for 25 years.
- Claude also traced the origin of base points for six curves (P-192 and five ANSI X9.62 example curves) to the random number generator in FreeLIP, Arjen Lenstra's long-integer arithmetic package — the first NIST base points ever explained.
- The $36,864 bounty for solving the mystery will be donated to the Internet Security Research Group, per the Anthropic research team.
- B-163 binary seed and the base points for P-224, P-256, P-384, and P-521 remain unexplained despite the team's exhaustive analysis using the Lenstra–Lenstra–Lovász lattice basis reduction algorithm.
Why it matters: For the cryptographic community, this closes a 25-year chapter of suspicion that NIST's ECDSA curve parameters contained NSA-planted weaknesses — the seeds came from a mundane 1990s C-library PRNG seeded by Unix timestamps, which anyone can now reproduce. No user action is needed since researchers already trusted the curves, but the $36,864 bounty is being redirected to the Internet Security Research Group.
Ask SkimNews
