Anthropic reported that its Claude model identified the origin of five NIST standard elliptic curve seeds in under 30 minutes. This discovery addresses a 26-year-old cryptographic mystery regarding the parameters provided by the NSA for the Digital Signature Standard.
The model analyzed software tools from the 1990s and determined that the seeds originated from the lrand48 pseudorandom number generator in C libraries, initialized with Unix timestamps. The research traced the generation process back to the 1997-1998 period.
Specifically, the seeds for P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384, and P-521 were linked to these timestamps. For the P-256 curve, the seed corresponds to the 1,842nd candidate value generated on August 16, 1997. Anthropic has released the reproduction code.
The company clarified that this finding does not constitute a break of ECDSA or a new attack vector. The results serve to reduce concerns regarding potential backdoors in the parameters. Some details, such as the B-163 seed source, remain unexplained.
