Anthropic has unveiled the results from its in-house research model, Claude, which has made a remarkable breakthrough. Without any preliminary hints, Claude successfully deciphered the generation methods behind five NIST elliptic curve seeds—a mystery that has perplexed the cryptographic community for over 20 years—in under 30 minutes. These seeds were found to be generated using the outdated pseudorandom number generator lrand48 from a C library, with its initial state set by the Unix timestamp. Moreover, Claude also traced the origins of some curve base points.
This revelation does not undermine the security of ECDSA, nor does it pave the way for new attack strategies. Instead, it further mitigates the potential risk of human-inserted backdoors in the relevant curves and bolsters confidence in the parameters. Nevertheless, the entire design process has not been completely reconstructed, and the generation methods for certain curve seeds and base points remain unaccounted for.
This study underscores the efficiency of state-of-the-art large models in conducting real scientific research characterized by clear boundaries, open data, and rigorously verifiable outcomes. The previously announced reward for uncovering the seed origins will now be donated to an internet security research organization.