Claude traces the NSA's unexplained elliptic-curve seeds to a simple C random number generator

Anthropic says Claude has solved a cryptography puzzle that went unanswered for 25 years, and that it took under 30 minutes. In 2000, NIST standardized several elliptic curves in ECDSA, the most widely used framework for elliptic-curve digital signatures. The NSA supplied the seeds used to generate the curve parameters but never said how they were made. That gap fed suspicion of a possible backdoor and drew a bounty and amateur investigators. The late NSA employee Jerry Solinas had suggested the seeds were a hash of a humorous phrase, but that turned out to be wrong. According to The Decoder, Claude found that the seeds came from lrand48, a simple C random number generator, started from a Unix timestamp between May 1997 and April 1998. The clue was that lrand48 outputs only 31 bits, so the top bits of some seeds were always zero. Anthropic says this origin makes a deliberate backdoor less likely. It is donating the $36,864 bounty to the Internet Security Research Group. The finding matters to cryptographers and to anyone who relies on those curves, because the unexplained seeds had long been a reason to distrust them. It also shows AI models being used to spot statistical patterns in old, unresolved security questions.