Claude cracks 30-year mystery: ECDSA curve seeds were just RNG output
scaling01 · x · 2026-10-17
Anthropic's Frontier Red Team reports that Claude solved a decades-old cryptography mystery: the provenance of the NSA-supplied seeds behind ECDSA's standard elliptic curves (adopted by NIST in FIPS 186-2, 2000).
- The seeds were provided by the NSA in the late 1990s with no explanation (e.g. P-256's SEED = C49D3608...), fueling years of backdoor speculation, an amateur investigation and even a bounty
- Verdict: they're just output from a basic random number generator seeded with timestamps — the best-known story has NSA's Jerry Solinas hashing a humorous passphrase, with code by Bob Reiter
- Anthropic frames it as a fun closing chapter: no action needed, most researchers already trusted the curves
Related event: Claude Cracks Decades-Old Mystery of ECDSA Curve Seeds in Under 30 Minutes(5 posts)→
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