Claude traces NIST curve seeds to 1997 timestamps

Anthropic said on Oct. 16 that an internal research model traced the NIST P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 seeds to the C library lrand48 generator seeded with Unix timestamps from May 1997 to April 1998. The P-256 seed matches 1,842 iterations from 1997-08-16 01:52:34 UTC, and Anthropic said this is not a break in ECDSA. Filippo Valsorda said he reimplemented the method and that the team claimed his bounty on Oct. 15 at 01:07:51 UTC; the $36,864 prize goes to the Internet Security Research Group. The B-163 seed and the base points for P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 remain unexplained.