Anthropic researchers used a Claude model to identify the origin of seeds for five NIST elliptic curves (P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384, P-521). The analysis revealed that the seeds were generated using the lrand48 function from a standard C library, seeded with Unix timestamps from 1997 and 1998.
The model successfully reconstructed the 48-bit state for these seeds, which regenerates all 160 bits of the original values. While this finding makes the theory of intentional backdoors less plausible, it does not definitively rule them out. Several aspects remain unexplained, including the B-163 binary curve seed and the selection criteria for specific candidates.
A separate study explored the use of Claude Mythos 5 to design quantum circuits for eight primitives. The model produced resource estimates suggesting significant reductions in gate counts, such as a 17-fold decrease for elliptic curve point addition and a 12-fold decrease for a Reed-Solomon decoder, compared to existing published schemes.
These quantum circuit results are theoretical resource estimates rather than hardware benchmarks. The findings were verified by an external software evaluator and a preprint co-authored with researchers from Harvard. The prize of $36 864 for solving the NIST seed mystery was awarded to the Internet Security Research Group.
