Anthropic's Claude Solves 25-Year-Old ECDSA Seed Mystery

• •Claude identified the seeds for NIST elliptic curves as originating from a Unix timestamp-based RNG.
• •The discovery alleviates fears of backdoors in widely used cryptographic standards.
• •The results were independently verified, confirming the integrity of the ECDSA standard.

On October 16, 2026, Anthropic announced that its AI model, Claude, traced the origins of seeds used in five NIST-standard elliptic curves to a pseudorandom number generator called lrand48, initialized with Unix timestamps. This discovery resolves a long-standing mystery about whether the NSA deliberately introduced backdoors into the ECDSA standard, which has been in use since 2000. The seeds were generated between May 1997 and April 1998, and Claude's findings suggest that the generation process can be publicly reproduced, reducing concerns about covert manipulation. The research has been corroborated by independent verification from cryptographer Filippo Valsorda, who confirmed the results and the associated bounty payout of $36,864 to a charitable organization. The findings do not introduce new vulnerabilities or attack vectors, strengthening confidence in the integrity of the ECDSA curves.