Claude cracks decades-old NIST curve seed mystery in under half an hour — it was just timestamps
voooooogel · x · 2026-10-17
- Anthropic reports that an internal research model, asked with no hints, solved the long-standing mystery of the NIST ECDSA curve seeds in under half an hour, identifying origins for P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521.
- The seeds were not hashes of a humorous passphrase (as the NSA's Jerry Solinas legend went), but outputs of the C library's lrand48 RNG seeded with Unix timestamps.
- The seeds, provided by the NSA in FIPS 186-2 (2000) with no explanation, fueled decades of speculation, amateur investigations and a bounty; Koblitz & Menezes chronicled the controversy in "A Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma".
- Anthropic frames it as a fun closing chapter: no action needed, most researchers already trusted the curves.
Related event: Claude Cracks Decades-Old ECDSA Curve Seed Mystery in Under 30 Minutes(8 posts)→
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