Reconstruction of standard elliptic-curve seed generation
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How were the public seeds for the standard NIST and ANSI elliptic curves generated? Reproducing the seeds is a provenance problem separate from reproducing the hash-based derivation of curve parameters.
Why it matters and what counts as progress
Why it matters: A compact regeneration recipe explains previously unexplained parameter choices without by itself establishing historical intent.
What counts as progress: A reproducible generator, timestamp and candidate index matching a seed exactly, corroborating historical evidence, or an explanation for seeds still outside the reported recipe, including B-163.
How the problem developed
National Institute of Standards and Technology FIPS 186-2 specified ECDSA and published curve seeds whose provenance was not explained in the standard.
- 16 Oct 2026 · Reported claim [2]
Anthropic Frontier Red Team and Claude Reported that the NIST P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384, and P-521 seeds reproduce from lrand48 outputs initialized with Unix timestamps; several base points, B-163, and skipped candidate choices remain unexplained.
AI contribution
Anthropic reports: Claude reconstructs NIST elliptic-curve seed generation
Anthropic reports recovering a reproducible lrand48-and-timestamp recipe for all five NIST prime-curve seeds, five additional ANSI prime-curve seeds and four NIST binary-curve seeds. The reported timestamps and candidate indices regenerate each 160-bit public seed. The NIST B-163 seed remains unexplained.
Sources
Website timeline
Publication dates and editorial changes.
Anthropic reports: Claude reconstructs NIST elliptic-curve seed generation