Claude Traces NIST Cryptography Seeds To An Old Random-Number Generator
Summary
Anthropic says Claude reconstructed the process used to generate seeds for several NIST elliptic curves, including P-256, tracing them to the C library’s lrand48 pseudorandom generator and Unix timestamps. The finding addresses longstanding questions about the parameters’ origins, which the NSA had published without a clear explanation. Reproducing P-256’s seed took 1,842 candidate iterations. Anthropic says the work does not reveal a way to attack the curves, break private keys or show that implementations are unsafe, and requires no urgent corrective action. The significance is greater transparency about a cryptographic design decision, not an AI breakthrough against encryption.
