AI news · October 17, 2026
Claude finds the timestamp source behind NIST ECDSA seeds
Claude traced five ECDSA curve seeds to a timestamped lrand48 sequence in under 30 minutes; Anthropic says this explains their origin, not a break in the cryptography.
- NIST curves explained
- 5
- reported search time
- <30 min
- bounty donated
- $36,864
Anthropic reported on October 16 that an internal research model found the origin of the seeds used for NIST P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384, and P-521. The model identified output from the C library’s lrand48 random-number generator, seeded with a Unix timestamp, rather than a hidden hash phrase. The result answers a long-running question about how the parameters were made.
Anthropic says the work does not create a new attack or require users to change their cryptographic setup. One binary-field curve remains unexplained, and the company donated a $36,864 bounty to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The result is a good research case study: the model searched historical code and tested candidate procedures, while humans still checked the match and its limits.
What you can do with it
Use this as a research-method example, not as a security patch. Give a model a narrow historical question, public source files, and a scriptable check. Require it to show candidate procedures, exact matches, failed paths, and a human review before treating an explanation as settled.
Our take
The interesting part is the loop between model search and a cheap reproducible check. It turns a vague historical mystery into a falsifiable result, but the claim still depends on source interpretation and the unexplained curve. Good research tooling makes uncertainty visible rather than hiding it behind a confident answer.
Source: Anthropic — Made With Models writes the brief; the reporting is theirs.