Anthropic: Claude established that the seeds of NIST's elliptic curves were produced by a pseudorandom number generator seeded with a timestamp
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
SI helped answer a long-standing question about the origin of standard cryptographic constants, but the conclusion so far comes from the authors themselves.
According to Anthropic, the NIST curve seeds — 10 for prime curves (May 1997 to April 1998) and 4 for binary curves (April 1998) — were produced by the C library function lrand48 initialized with the current time rather than by a cryptographic hash; P-256 took 1842 iterations. Anthropic puts the odds of such a match arising by chance at about 1 in 5810 and publishes Python code that reproduces the seeds. The company writes that a simple, reproducible method leaves less room for a hidden backdoor, but the seed of curve B-163 is unexplained, the base points of most curves could not be traced, and the criteria for choosing the curves are unknown.
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