25-Year Mystery Solved: NIST Elliptic Curve Seeds Came from lrand48 and Unix Timestamps
Researchers at Anthropic used the Claude model to trace the origins of the mysterious seed values embedded in NIST elliptic curves standardized in FIPS 186-2. The seeds for curves including NIST P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 were not derived from hashed humorous phrases as previously rumored but instead generated by the non-cryptographic lrand48 linear congruential generator seeded with Unix timestamps from 1997 and 1998. The discovery also explains the base points of several curves using the FreeLIP library's random number generator. The findings reduce long-standing suspicions of deliberate backdoors inserted by the NSA. Several candidate curves that met the criteria were skipped during selection, leaving open questions about the exact filtering process. The work was performed by a team including Nicholas Carlini and others, with the reproduction code released into the public domain.
HabrOct 17, 2026Translated from Russian