What happened
Anthropic's Claude solved a 25-year-old cryptography mystery in under 30 minutes, finding the unexplained seeds behind NIST's ECDSA curves came from 'lrand48', a simple C random number generator initialized with a Unix timestamp between May 1997 and April 1998.
Why it matters
According to Anthropic, the finding makes deliberate backdoors in the widely used digital signature standard far less likely, resolving suspicion that had fueled a bounty and amateur sleuthing efforts.
WHO IT HITSThe finding matters for security engineers and cryptographers who rely on ECDSA for digital signatures, and for anyone who had questioned whether the NIST curves contained hidden weaknesses.
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NIST standardized several curves in the ECDSA standard back in 2000, with the NSA supplying the seeds used to generate the curve parameters. The lack of explanation for those starting values fueled suspicion of possible backdoors, and the mystery attracted a bounty and amateur sleuthing efforts. Even the late NSA employee Jerry Solinas suggested the seeds were a hash of a humorous phrase, but that turned out to be wrong.
Claude spotted the pattern because 'lrand48' only outputs 31 bits, and the top bits in some seeds were systematically zero. That detail allowed the model to identify the source as a simple C random number generator initialized with a Unix timestamp between May 1997 and April 1998. According to Anthropic, this makes deliberate backdoors less likely.
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