Researchers at Anthropic have identified the origin of the mysterious seed used in the NIST P-256 elliptic curve. Using the Claude AI model, the team traced the seed to a standard Unix pseudorandom number generator, lrand48/drand48, initialized on August 16, 1997, at 01:52:34 UTC.
The analysis revealed that the P-256 seed corresponds to candidate number 1842 from that specific generator run. Similar patterns were identified for other curves, including P-192, P-224, P-384, and P-521, with timestamps ranging from May 1997 to April 1998. Claude recovered the generation method in less than 30 minutes.
The findings were published on October 16, 2026, following a bounty challenge of $36,864 initiated by cryptographer Filippo Valsorda. The Anthropic team claimed the prize and donated the funds to the Internet Security Research Group.
The seeds were originally provided to the ANSI X9.62 committee in 1997 by NSA mathematician Jerry Solinas. NIST later standardized the P-256 curve in 2000. The research concludes that the seeds were generated using standard tools of the era, finding no evidence of intentional cryptographic backdoors.
