Claude Traces NIST Cryptographic Seeds to 1990s Random Number Generator

Anthropic says Claude traced unexplained seeds for widely used NIST elliptic curves to a random number generator from older C libraries, as detailed in a research post. An internal research model found the connection in under 30 minutes after examining how software in the 1990s may have generated the values.

Claude determined that seeds for P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 came from lrand48, initialized with Unix timestamps from 1997 and 1998. It also recovered the origins of four binary curve seeds and reproduced the published values using the recovered timestamps and candidate positions.

The finding is not a cryptographic break and does not require users to change systems. Anthropic says the reproducible process makes deliberate weaknesses in the curve parameters less plausible, although the selection criteria for some candidates remain unknown.

Claude also traced the base points of P-192 and five ANSI X9.62 curves to a random number generator in the FreeLIP arithmetic package. The origins of the B-163 seed and the base points for P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 remain unexplained. A $36,864 bounty for solving the seed mystery will be donated to the Internet Security Research Group.