Anthropic Says Claude Reconstructed Five NIST Elliptic-Curve Seeds Using a Timestamp-Initialized Generator

Anthropic's Claude solved the mystery of how the NSA generated seeds for elliptic curves standardized by NIST in 2000, reportedly in under 30 minutes. The seeds came from `lrand48`, initialized with a Unix timestamp between May 1997 and April 1998; systematically zero top bits pointed to the generator's 31-bit output. According to Anthropic, the finding makes deliberate backdoors less likely, and the company is donating the $36,864 bounty to the Internet Security Research Group.

According to Anthropic, an internal Claude research model reconstructed how five NIST elliptic curve seeds were generated in under half an hour, with independent verification by bounty organizer Filippo Valsorda. Claude identified patterns consistent with lrand48, used LLL lattice reduction to recover generator states, and traced initialization values to Unix timestamps between May 1997 and April 1998. Some skipped candidate curves, the B-163 seed, and certain curve base points remain unexplained.