Does this mean ECDSA is broken or unsafe?

No. Anthropic says the finding does not demonstrate a vulnerability in ECDSA; it only identifies how the seed values were generated.

How did Claude reproduce a specific curve's seed?

For the P-256 curve, it generated random numbers from a starting value of August 16, 1997, 01:52:34 UTC and took the 1,842nd candidate when split into 20-byte chunks.

Large Language ModelsAI Safety & AlignmentGIGAZINE AI3m agoOct 19, 2026, 19:01 JST

Claude traces ECDSA seeds to 1990s lrand48 random numbers

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3 Key Points

What happened
Anthropic said Claude, given the task in October 2026, found in under 30 minutes that NIST's five ECDSA curve seeds came from the 'lrand48' pseudo-random generator, seeded with 1997–1998 Unix timestamps.
Why it matters
Because the seeds trace to an ordinary random generator, the long-suspected chance of a deliberate backdoor is now considered lower than before — and Anthropic says the finding does not show ECDSA is vulnerable.

WHO IT HITSSecurity researchers and cryptography engineers who rely on NIST's elliptic-curve standards gain a documented origin for the seeds, while organizations using ECDSA certificates see no indicated need to change them based on this finding.

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FAQ

Does this mean ECDSA is broken or unsafe?: No. Anthropic says the finding does not demonstrate a vulnerability in ECDSA; it only identifies how the seed values were generated.
How did Claude reproduce a specific curve's seed?: For the P-256 curve, it generated random numbers from a starting value of August 16, 1997, 01:52:34 UTC and took the 1,842nd candidate when split into 20-byte chunks.

GIGAZINE AIRead Original Article

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