Summary
- An internal Anthropic research model used a custom scanner to solve a decades-old mystery regarding the origins of NIST ECDSA cryptographic curve seeds.
- Claude discovered that the seeds for several NIST prime and binary curves were generated using the 1990s C library lrand48 random-number generator seeded with Unix timestamps.
- The findings indicate that the standard curves were selected using simple pseudorandom generation rather than intentional backdoors, easing long-standing community suspicions.
- Additionally, Claude identified that base points for six curves originated from the random number generator in Arjen Lenstra's FreeLIP package.
- The bounty for solving the mystery will be donated to the Internet Security Research Group.
Why it matters
Solving the origin of standard cryptographic curve seeds removes long-standing suspicions of intentional backdoors in widely used security standards, increasing trust in elliptic curve cryptography without requiring any technical changes.