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AIAnthropic10:48 PM

Why it mattersAnthropic's internal data shows junior technical hires falling from 27% to 9%, agents logging six times human hours, and human attention becoming the bottleneck, but it is a single self-reported company with non-random adoption and no external validation.

ProductsThe Register10:24 PM

Why it mattersPostgreSQL 19 slipped to about November 19 and lost 8-10 features because LLM-assisted code review surfaced more defects than maintainers could fix, a concrete case of AI review changing open source release practice, though it rests on one project and one com…

ScienceAnthropic10:03 PM

Why it mattersAn AI model reportedly solved a 25-year cryptographic mystery in under 30 minutes by tracing NIST curve seeds to lrand48 and timestamps, making deliberate backdoors less plausible, though it is self-reported by Anthropic and changes no practical security.

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Sciencevia AnthropicToday · 10:03 PM

Anthropic Says Claude Traced NIST ECDSA Curve Seeds to a Random Number Generator

What happened

Anthropic says its Claude research model worked out where the seed values behind several widely used NIST elliptic curves came from, resolving a question that has lingered since ECDSA, a standard digital signature method, was adopted by NIST in 2000.

Why it matters

Anthropic stresses this is not a cryptographic break, a new attack, or a weakness in the curves, and that readers need take no action.

In detail

The seeds were supplied by the NSA without explanation.

According to Anthropic, Claude found in under half an hour that the seeds for NIST P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 were not hash outputs, as a popular theory about a humorous passphrase had held.

Instead, they came from the C library's lrand48 random number generator, started from a Unix timestamp.

Anthropic says a curious employee prompted the model in October 2026 without giving it the passphrase clue.

It argues the finding makes deliberate backdoors much less plausible, because the seeds came from a simple, reproducible process built on a common pseudorandom generator and the clock.

Anthropic says the seeds had long drawn suspicion because the curve parameters reached NIST with no account of how they were chosen.

It also notes that most researchers already trusted the curves.

The company has published code that regenerates the seeds, and says the $36,864 bounty for finding them will go to the Internet Security Research Group.

Anthropic describes the method as a search for the kind of weak 1990s random number generator that might have produced the seeds. Claude noticed a zero-bit pattern consistent with lrand48, then used a lattice reduction technique (the LLL algorithm) to recover the generator's internal state for the prime-curve seeds. Stepping that state backward yielded timestamps between May 1997 and April 1998. For the binary curves, the timestamps appear to have been halved. Claude also traced base points for six curves, including P-192 and several ANSI X9.62 example curves, to a random number generator in the FreeLIP integer arithmetic package. Anthropic says open questions remain: why some viable candidate curves were skipped, how the B-163 seed was made, and how the base points for P-224, P-256, P-384, P-521 and the NIST binary curves were chosen.

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Anthropic Says Claude Traced NIST ECDSA Curve Seeds to a Random Number Generator

What happened

Why it matters

Anthropic stresses this is not a cryptographic break, a new attack, or a weakness in the curves, and that readers need take no action.

In detail

The seeds were supplied by the NSA without explanation.

Instead, they came from the C library's lrand48 random number generator, started from a Unix timestamp.

Anthropic says a curious employee prompted the model in October 2026 without giving it the passphrase clue.

It argues the finding makes deliberate backdoors much less plausible, because the seeds came from a simple, reproducible process built on a common pseudorandom generator and the clock.

Anthropic says the seeds had long drawn suspicion because the curve parameters reached NIST with no account of how they were chosen.

It also notes that most researchers already trusted the curves.

The company has published code that regenerates the seeds, and says the $36,864 bounty for finding them will go to the Internet Security Research Group.

Importance90out of 100High importance

An automated editorial system rates every story from 0 to 100 for its significance. Only stories above a strict threshold are published; the higher the score, the greater the importance.

VOICE COMMENTS0 comments

Readers on this story

Record a comment of up to 60 seconds. Others can listen now or later, and reply with their own.

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Anthropic Says Claude Traced NIST ECDSA Curve Seeds to a Random Number Generator

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Anthropic Report Finds AI Cutting Entry-Level Tech Hiring While Boosting

PostgreSQL 19 Release Delayed After LLM-Assisted Reviews Find Architecture Flaws

Anthropic Says Claude Traced NIST ECDSA Curve Seeds to a Random Number Generator

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