Claude cracks the NSA seed mystery in 30 minutes

When NIST established the ECDSA standard in 2000, it adopted curve parameter seeds provided by the NSA, whose origins remained undisclosed for years, becoming a 25-year unsolved mystery in the cryptography community. On October 17, 2026, The Decoder reported that Anthropic's Claude cracked this puzzle in less than 30 minutes. The research found that the seeds came from the C language random number generator lrand48, initialized with Unix timestamps from May 1997 to April 1998. Claude was able to identify this pattern because lrand48 only outputs 31 bits, causing the high bits of some seeds to be systematically zero, which exposed the generation method. This discovery reveals the NSA's specific method for generating the seeds, providing an answer to the long-unresolved question of the standard parameters' origins.

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