{"id":151996,"date":"2026-10-19T13:30:39","date_gmt":"2026-10-19T13:30:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=151996"},"modified":"2026-10-19T13:30:39","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T13:30:39","slug":"claude-traces-nist-cryptography-seeds-to-an-old-random-number-generator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=151996","title":{"rendered":"Claude Traces NIST Cryptography Seeds To An Old Random-Number Generator"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>An unusual piece of cryptography history has gained an answer. Anthropic says Claude reconstructed how the original seed values behind several widely used NIST elliptic curves were generated, resolving a question that had attracted suspicion for more than two decades.<\/p>\n<p><strong>TL;DR:<\/strong> Claude identified a process involving the C library\u2019s lrand48 generator and Unix timestamps. Anthropic stresses that the research does not reveal an attack on P-256 or other affected curves.<\/p>\n<p>The seeds have mattered because the standards published their values without a convincing public account of how the numbers were chosen. The U.S. National <a href=\"https:\/\/bitcoinist.com\/glossary\/cybersecurity\/\">Security<\/a> Agency had supplied them, leaving generations of researchers to ask whether a secret selection method could hide some mathematical advantage.<\/p>\n<p>Anthropic reports that a model worked backward from the published values and found an ordinary pseudorandom generation procedure. In the case of P-256, it took 1,842 iterations through candidate outputs to reproduce the standardized seed. The work also examined P-192, P-224, P-384 and P-521.<\/p>\n<p>This is interesting to <a href=\"https:\/\/bitcoinist.com\/glossary\/cryptocurrency\/\">crypto<\/a> users because elliptic-curve signatures underpin many kinds of account security, including passkeys and <a href=\"https:\/\/bitcoinist.com\/glossary\/hardware-wallet\/\">hardware-backed authentication<\/a>. Explaining the provenance of parameters can improve confidence in the standards without changing the mathematics used by existing products.<\/p>\n<p>There is a crucial limit to the story: recovering the seed-generation history is not the same as breaking a private key, proving the curve has a vulnerability or establishing that every implementation is safe. Anthropic itself says there is no urgent corrective action to take.<\/p>\n<p>The headline is less about AI defeating encryption than AI helping researchers reconstruct a forgotten design decision. In cryptography, knowing why numbers look the way they do can be almost as valuable as knowing that the calculations work.<\/p>\n<p><em>Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An unusual piece of cryptography history has gained an answer. Anthropic says Claude reconstructed how the original seed values behind several widely used NIST elliptic curves were generated, resolving a question that had attracted suspicion for more than two decades. TL;DR: Claude identified a process involving the C library\u2019s lrand48 generator and Unix timestamps. Anthropic [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3,4,5],"class_list":["post-151996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-crypto","tag-doge","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=151996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151996\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=151996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=151996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=151996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}