Cryptoupdated 49m ago2 min read
Claude Traces NIST Elliptic-Curve Seeds To lrand48 Unix Timestamps In Under 30 Minutes
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Claude traced NSA-provided seeds for five NIST elliptic curves to Unix timestamp-based RNG. Seeds originated from a standard C pseudorandom generator seeded with timestamps, not a backdoor.
Claude traces NSA seeds
Claude traced the origin of five NIST elliptic-curve seeds to an ordinary random-number generator seeded with Unix timestamps from 1997 and 1998, taking “less than 30 minutes.” Claude “discovered the origins of the NIST P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384, and P-521 seeds” and none of them were the result of any hash algorithm at all. The seeds came from the C library’s lrand48 random-number generator, and it described the process as “seeded with a Unix timestamp!”
The work is not a cryptographic break and “There is no action to be taken or things to do differently.” Claude reproduced the sequence behind P-256 and found an exact match for its published seed at the 1,842nd candidate.
From passphrase to timestamps
The decades-old provenance question centered on seeds provided by the NSA to NIST “with no explanation or justification,” and it described the mystery as long-standing open question of the cryptographic community. Earlier suspicions about a humorous passphrase were wrong, and it quoted a recollection that included “Give Bob and Jerry a raise” as an example of the kind of phrase that had been suggested. Claude instead “discovered the origins of the NIST P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384, and P-521 seeds” by identifying that the seeds were generated from lrand48 output rather than a phrase hash.
Claude wrote a scanner that slid along each published seed one bit at a time and tested adjacent chunks as consecutive outputs, and it said the scan covered 34 combinations of generator and output slices. The P-256 seed was produced by a run seeded at a Unix timestamp and the standardized seed appeared as the 1,842nd candidate.
No flaw, but less room
The discovery “is not a cryptographic break, new attack, or weakness in the ECDSA curves,” and it framed the result as making deliberate backdoors less plausible. The seeds were generated in a “very simple way: a common pseudorandom number generator initialized from the clock,” and it said that anyone can now reproduce the construction. The work “makes us more confident the curves were chosen without any backdoors or intentional weaknesses,” while also noting that researchers still could not explain the origins of several other curve parameters.
“This is not a cryptographic break, new attack, or weakness in the ECDSA curves.”
The company’s findings “do not expose a security flaw and require no action from users,” and it said the work settles concerns about ECDSA provenance. Bitcoin avoided the NIST curve path in the reporting, and CoinDesk said Bitcoin’s wallets use secp256k1, describing it as “a simpler curve with little room to conceal a weakness.”