Anthropic reveals that a Claude research model identified how the NSA generated seeds for five prominent NIST elliptic curves in just 30 minutes This article explores identified nsa generated. . This resolves a cryptographic provenance mystery.
According to the October 16 report, the answer was not a secret passphrase, but a standard C pseudorandom number generator initialized with Unix timestamps. Anthropic describes it as a historical reconstruction rather than a cryptographic break, noting no new attack or reason to change deployments. Its curve-generation procedures relied on published seeds and SHA-1 to derive curve parameters, enabling verification of the derivation without revealing the seeds' origins.
A 2023 bounty, organized by cryptographer Filippo Valsorda, targeted the five prime-curve seeds, following reports that they were hashes of humorous English phrases linked to NSA mathematician Jerry Solinas. Anthropic notes that Claude traced P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384, and P-521 to lrand48, a legacy linear congruential generator with a 48-bit internal state. Four binary-curve seeds exhibited a notable pattern: their five 32-bit words consistently had zero top bits, matching lrand48's 31-bit output.
Researchers found skipped candidates that appeared to produce suitable curves, leaving the original selection criteria unresolved. Anthropic argues that the reproducible timestamp-based construction reduces concerns about deliberate manipulation, although it does not establish every historical decision.
