Elliptic Curves

The NIST Elliptic Curves Seeds Bounty Has Been Claimed

Filippo Valsorda reports that the long-mysterious seeds of the NIST P-curves were not hashes of forgotten sentences but drand48 output seeded with UNIX timestamps from 1997–98. A team from Anthropic solved it and claimed his bounty, donating the tripled $36,864 prize to ISRG, the non-profit behind Let's Encrypt.

Blog post · Cryptography · Security · History · Elliptic Curves

Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins

Anthropic's Frontier Red Team explains how Claude helped uncover how the unexplained seeds behind the NIST ECDSA curves in FIPS 186-2 were generated: from timestamps fed into a standard random number generator, not a hidden passphrase. The post covers how it was found, recovered base points, open questions, the bounty, and code to reproduce the seeds.

Research · Cryptography · Security · AI · Elliptic Curves