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.
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