Claude traced NIST's ECDSA curve seeds to a 1990s random generator
Why it matters
Anthropic says Claude found that the NSA-supplied seeds for NIST P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 weren't a hash of a joke passphrase but output of the C library's lrand48, seeded with a Unix timestamp (P-256 = candidate 1842, 1997-08-16 UTC). Found in under half an hour; reproducible. Not a crypto break, and it makes a backdoor much less plausible. Still open: the B-163 seed and most base points. The $36,864 bounty goes to ISRG.
Read the source: Anthropic (opens in a new tab)
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