13 Years of Tinfoil Hats, and the Answer Was Just srand48(time(NULL))
___freddi___ · x · 2026-10-17
A punchline summary of Claude's ECDSA seed revelation: the crypto community spent 13 years in tinfoil hats suspecting an NSA backdoor in the P-256 seeds, and the answer turned out to be nothing more exotic than srand48(time(NULL)) — a humorous passphrase hashed with a system timestamp.
The contrast between the most paranoid theories and the most mundane explanation makes this the perfect footnote to the decades-old mystery.
Related event: Claude Cracks Decades-Old ECDSA Curve Seed Mystery in Under 30 Minutes(8 posts)→
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