Claude Traces NIST's ECDSA Curve Seeds to 1990s Unix Timestamps, Resolving Backdoor Concerns

Anthropic's Claude has solved a cryptographic mystery that spanned over two decades: the origin of the NIST ECDSA elliptic curve seeds. On October 16, 2026, Anthropic's Frontier Red Team announced that an internal Claude research model traced the provenance of five widely-used elliptic curves—P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384, and P-521—to outputs of the C library's lrand48 pseudorandom number generator initialized with Unix timestamps between May 1997 and April 1998. The discovery resolves lingering concerns about whether the NSA had deliberately embedded security weaknesses into one of the internet's most critical cryptographic standards.