Anthropic says Claude solved the NIST curve seeds mystery
The NSA never explained the random-looking numbers behind five standard encryption curves. Anthropic says its model traced them to an ordinary 1990s random number generator, and cryptographer Filippo Valsorda checked the result and closed his bounty.
Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team said on October 16 that an internal research model found the source of the seeds behind the NIST curves P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521. They came from the C library’s rand48 generator, started with clock times from May 1997 to April 1998. Valsorda rebuilt the method himself and confirmed it.