Claude solves a 20-year crypto mystery: NIST curve seeds came from a 90s PC clock
量子位 · wechat · 2026-10-17
Anthropic revealed that Claude cracked, in under half an hour, the origin of the seeds for the five NIST elliptic curves (P-192 through P-521) — a puzzle unsolved for 20+ years that cryptographer Filippo Valsorda had put a bounty on.
Jerry Solinas only recalled hashing a joke passphrase ('a raise for Bob and Jerry'), but Claude, given no such hint, ruled that out. It hypothesized a 90s C-library PRNG, scanned 34 generator combinations, found all 20 integers from four seeds had zero high bits, and identified lrand48. Using LLL lattice reduction and srand48 inversion, it traced the seed inputs to Unix timestamps between May 1997 and April 1998 — P-256 maps to 1997-08-16 01:52:34 UTC, candidate #1842.
The result was independently verified and shows the curves carry no hidden backdoor; B-163 remains unexplained.
Related event: Claude Cracks Decades-Old ECDSA Curve Seed Mystery in Under 30 Minutes(27 posts)→
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