Anthropic’s Claude solved a 25-year-old cryptography mystery. It found the seeds for NIST ECDSA curves came from a 1990s C library random-number generator. The generator was seeded with Unix timestamps from 1997 to 1998. The discovery rules out deliberate backdoors in the curve parameters. It also explains some base points from a separate arithmetic library. One seed and several base points remain unexplained. The bounty for solving this will go to the Internet Security Research Group. Anthropic provided code to reproduce the seeds.
What changed
The seeds for NIST ECDSA curves were unexplained and suspected of hidden origins.
What it unlocks
Reproducing the exact seeds used in NIST ECDSA curves with a Unix timestamp and a 1990s C library PRNG.
- 25-year-old mystery solved
- 10 NIST curve seeds recovered
- $36,864 bounty donated
Sources