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Anthropic's Claude traces NSA-supplied ECDSA curve seeds to lrand48 in under 30 minutes

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Anthropic's Claude traces NSA-supplied ECDSA curve seeds to lrand48 in under 30 minutes

The Decoder reports that Anthropic's AI Claude has solved a 25-year-old cryptography mystery, doing it in under 30 minutes.

The background: back in 2000, NIST standardized several curves in the ECDSA standard, the most widely used framework for elliptic-curve digital signatures. The NSA had supplied the seeds, the starting values used to generate the curve parameters, with zero explanation. No one knew how the seeds were created, and that fueled suspicion of possible backdoors. The mystery even attracted a bounty and amateur sleuthing efforts. The late NSA employee Jerry Solinas had suggested the seeds were a hash of a humorous phrase, but that turned out to be wrong.

Claude's answer is that the seeds came from "lrand48," a simple C random number generator, initialized with a Unix timestamp between May 1997 and April 1998. It spotted the pattern because lrand48 only outputs 31 bits, and the top bits in some seeds were systematically zero.

According to Anthropic, this makes deliberate backdoors less likely. Anthropic is donating the $36,864 bounty to the Internet Security Research Group.

Key facts

  • Per The Decoder, Claude traced the NSA-supplied seeds for NIST's ECDSA curves, standardized in 2000, to the C generator lrand48, and did so in under 30 minutes.
  • The generator was initialized with a Unix timestamp between May 1997 and April 1998.
  • The clue: lrand48 outputs only 31 bits, and the top bits in some seeds were systematically zero.
  • An earlier explanation from the late NSA employee Jerry Solinas, a hash of a humorous phrase, turned out to be wrong.
  • According to Anthropic, the finding makes deliberate backdoors less likely; Anthropic is donating the $36,864 bounty to the Internet Security Research Group.

Why it matters

The ECDSA curves standardized by NIST in 2000 came with seeds the NSA supplied and never explained. That silence fueled suspicion of backdoors for 25 years and drew a bounty and amateur investigators. If the account holds, the seeds trace to an ordinary C random number generator seeded with a timestamp, which according to Anthropic makes deliberate backdoors less likely. It is also a concrete example of an AI model solving a long-open puzzle in under 30 minutes.

Who it affects

Cryptographers and security engineers who rely on the NIST ECDSA curves, which belong to the most widely used framework for elliptic-curve digital signatures. It also touches the people who have long distrusted the NSA's role in the standard, and the Internet Security Research Group, which receives the $36,864 bounty as a donation from Anthropic.

How to use it

There is nothing to install or run in the report. The practical takeaway is the method as described: the pattern showed up because lrand48 outputs only 31 bits, so the top bits of some seeds were systematically zero. Readers who want to check the claim would look for that structure in the seeds themselves.

How solid is it

This is a secondary report from The Decoder, relaying what Anthropic says. The visible text does not link a paper or an Anthropic post. It does not say which Claude model was used, how it was prompted, whether the 30 minutes was wall-clock time or how much human help was involved, or whether the result has been independently verified or peer reviewed. The mechanism offered (a 31-bit generator, top bits systematically zero in some seeds, a timestamp range) is specific enough to be checked.

Risks and caveats

The source says only that deliberate backdoors are less likely according to Anthropic; it does not say they are ruled out. It names no specific curves beyond "several curves" in the ECDSA standard. It also does not say who posted or awarded the bounty. Until the original write-up and independent checks are available, treat the "under 30 minutes" figure and the conclusion as Anthropic's account.