Claude Cracks NSA's 25-Year-Old Elliptic Curve Seed Puzzle

An internal research model from Anthropic traced the origins of the five elliptic curve seeds that the NSA provided to NIST in the late 1990s in less than half an hour. These numbers, long suspected of containing hidden backdoors, were actually generated by the random number generator lrand48 in an outdated C language library combined with timestamps from 1997 and 1998. The model reproduced the widely used P-256 curve sequence, achieving an exact match with the publicly disclosed seed at the 1,842nd candidate value. Anthropic states that this finding significantly reduces the possibility of hidden backdoors, and users of NIST curves do not need to take any action, though it still cannot explain why the program skipped some available candidate values.

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