Are NIST Elliptic Curves Backdoored? Claude Solves the 25-Year Seed Mystery

Anthropic’s Claude model has solved a cryptography mystery that stood for a quarter century: the origin of the “seed” values baked into the NIST elliptic curves that secure much of the internet. The answer, published October 16, is that the seeds were never a hidden NSA backdoor. They came from a 1990s random number generator seeded with a Unix timestamp, according to Anthropic’s research . The company says the finding makes a deliberate weakness in the curves “much less plausible.” The curves in question, P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384, and P-521, underpin ECDSA, the most widely used elliptic-curve signature standard, which…

Source: Blockchain Reporter