Claude traces the origin of NIST ECDSA curve seeds to timestamps
Anthropic says Claude reconstructed the long-unexplained seed values behind widely used NIST ECDSA curves using the 1990s `lrand48` generator and Unix timestamps.
AT A GLANCE
Key points
- Claude traced five NIST prime-curve seeds to `lrand48`
- Recovered initial states map to Unix timestamps from 1997–1998
- Anthropic says the finding is not a break, attack, or curve weakness
- The B‑163 seed and several base points remain unexplained
What is changing?
Anthropic announced on October 16 that Claude had uncovered the origin of seed values used in NIST ECDSA curves. In under half an hour, the company’s internal research model linked the P‑192, P‑224, P‑256, P‑384, and P‑521 seeds to the `lrand48` pseudorandom-number generator found in 1990s C libraries.
Claude identified traces of 31-bit output in the published seeds, recovered the generator state, and showed that its initial values were Unix timestamps between May 1997 and April 1998. The research also reconstructed how P‑192 and several ANSI curve base points came from the older FreeLIP generator.
Anthropic stresses that this is not a cryptographic break, a new attack, or a weakness in the curves. The findings make a hidden backdoor less plausible, although the B‑163 seed and the selection of several base points remain unexplained.
Explore the original sources
Source date: 16 October 2026.
Published by AI Radar: 17 Oct 2026, 11:06 (Istanbul, UTC+3).
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