Anthropic says Claude cracked the decades-old mystery of ECDSA curve seed origins
wonderwomancode · x · 2026-10-17
Anthropic's Frontier Red Team reports that Claude resolved the decades-old mystery behind the ECDSA standard curve seeds. ECDSA, the most widely used elliptic curve cryptography standard, was adopted by NIST in 2000 (FIPS 186-2); the seed values defining curves like NIST P-256 were handed over by the NSA with no explanation, fueling decades of backdoor speculation and even a public bounty. The best-known story: longtime NSA employee Jerry Solinas generated the seeds by hashing a humorous passphrase along the lines of "Give Bob and Jerry a raise" with a counter, with code written by Bob Reiter. Anthropic stresses this is a fun closing chapter — no action needed, and 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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