ECDSA (Product): news timeline & CVEs

Claude AI Solves 25-Year NSA Cryptography Mystery in Just 30 Minutes

Anthropic’s Claude traced NIST curve seeds to a 1990s C random generator, not hidden NSA backdoors.

Anthropic says an internal Claude research model traced the published seeds for NIST curves P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 to lrand48, an older C library generator, in under 30 minutes. The seeds match runs initialized with Unix timestamps between May 1997 and April 1998; P-256 was the 1,842nd candidate from a run started on 16 August 1997. Five ANSI X9.62 example seeds fit the same construction, and some base points were linked to FreeLIP. Anthropic says this is not a cryptographic break, private keys were not recovered, and no changes to deployed systems are warranted, though B-163 and several base points remain unexplained.

Cyber Security NewsOct 17, 16:59 UTC · 3d agoResearch 4 sources7· 4 reads

Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins

Anthropic says Claude traced NIST ECDSA seeds to lrand48 outputs from Unix timestamps, not a hidden backdoor.

Anthropic reports that an internal Claude model recovered how NIST ECDSA curve seeds were generated. The P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384, and P-521 seeds, plus ANSI X9.62 seeds, match output from the C library’s lrand48 generator seeded by a Unix timestamp, not a hashed humorous passphrase. P-256 appeared after 1,842 iterations of 20-byte draws, and truncated linear-congruential state was recovered with LLL. Anthropic says this is not an attack or weakness and makes deliberate curve backdoors much less plausible.

Hacker News · AIupdated Oct 17, 16:59 UTC · 3d agofirst Oct 16, 18:55 UTC · 4d agoResearch 4 sources HN 113↑ · 38 comments8· 3 reads

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Claude AI Solves 25-Year NSA Cryptography Mystery in Just 30 Minutes

Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins