Anthropic's Claude traces origins of NIST elliptic curve seeds to timestamp generator
Overview
Anthropic says its internal research model Claude found how the seeds for several NIST and ANSI elliptic curves were generated, a question open since the 1990s.
Anthropic says Claude discovered the origins of the NIST P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 seeds in under half an hour. 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 had been rumored.
Anthropic says this is not a cryptographic break, new attack, or weakness in the ECDSA curves, but that it makes backdoors in the curves less plausible. Anthropic says the work leaves some base points and one binary seed unexplained.
Written by AI from the articles below · updated Oct 16, 3:31 PM ET
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- Anthropic ResearchOfficialPickClaude finds the origin of NIST elliptic curve seeds in a timestamp-based generator
AIAnthropic 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.
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