Claude finds the origin of NIST elliptic curve seeds in a timestamp-based generator

Anthropic says its internal research model Claude found how the seeds of several NIST and ANSI elliptic curves were generated, a question open since the 1990s.

The seeds came from the C library's lrand48 random-number generator initialized with a Unix timestamp, not from a hash of a passphrase as rumored. Anthropic says this is not a cryptographic break and makes it less plausible the curves contain backdoors.

It leaves some base points and one binary seed unexplained.