Claude Recovers Origins of NIST Elliptic Curve Seeds, Closing Decades-Old Mystery
jedisct1 · x · 2026-10-17
Anthropic's Frontier Red Team reports that Claude helped resolve a long-standing cryptographic mystery: the provenance of the NSA-provided seed values used to define coefficients of the NIST elliptic curves in ECDSA (FIPS 186-2, adopted 2000). The leading story was that NSA's Jerry Solinas generated the seeds by hashing a humorous passphrase like "Give Bob and Jerry a raise". Anthropic stresses this is a fun closing chapter—no action needed, as most researchers already trusted the curves.
Related event: Claude Cracks Decades-Old ECDSA Curve Seed Mystery in Under 30 Minutes(27 posts)→
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