Claude traces NIST's ECDSA curve seeds to 1990s timestamps
Anthropic says Claude identified the generator behind five prime-curve seeds, while several curve parameters remain unexplained.
By Ryan Merket · Published
Primary source: Anthropic
Why it matters
Claude's work turns a decades-old provenance question into a reproducible result, while the skipped candidates and unexplained curve parameters show what the discovery does not settle.
Anthropic researchers say Claude traced the origins of five NIST elliptic-curve seeds to a 1990s C-library random-number generator initialized with Unix timestamps. The result, published October 16th, addresses a longstanding question about values supplied by the NSA without an explanation of how they were generated. Anthropic says the discovery is not a cryptographic break and requires no change to how ECDSA is used.…