THE SEEDS CAME FROM A '90S RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR FED WITH 1997 TIMESTAMPS — NOT A HIDDEN PHRASE

Anthropic says an internal research version of Claude reconstructed the origins of five cryptographic parameters supplied by the US National Security Agency, resolving a question open for more than 25 years. The model identified the seeds behind the P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384, and P-521 curves as outputs from lrand48, a conventional C pseudorandom number generator initialised with Unix timestamps from the late 1990s. The investigation took less than 30 minutes.

The finding undercuts the long-running theory that the seeds were hashed from a humorous phrase NSA mathematician Jerry Solinas had forgotten, and Anthropic says the reproducible procedure makes deliberate manipulation of the curves less plausible. For P-256, the published seed emerged as the 1,842nd candidate in the generated sequence. Anthropic stressed the discovery is not a cryptographic attack and requires no changes to existing systems, though the seed for the binary curve B-163 and some base-point choices remain unexplained. The $36,864 bounty goes to the Internet Security Research Group, which operates Let's Encrypt.