Anthropic announced that its AI model Claude has successfully reconstructed the origin of seed values used for several NIST-standardized elliptic curves. The investigation revealed that these seeds came from a process involving the lrand48 generator from the C library and Unix timestamps. The U.S. National Security Agency had supplied these values, fueling more than two decades of speculation about whether a secret selection method could hide some mathematical advantage. The research examined P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 curves, with P-256 requiring 1,842 iterations to reproduce the standardized seed. This finding does not constitute an attack on or vulnerability in these elliptic curves, but rather answers a historical question that had persisted since their standardization.
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