Overview
- Anthropic disclosed Friday that an internal research version of its Claude model traced five NSA‑supplied NIST elliptic‑curve seeds to output from the old C library generator lrand48 seeded with 1997–1998 Unix timestamps.
- The model detected a statistical fingerprint of lrand48, recovered the generator's internal state using lattice (LLL) techniques, and rewound that state to reproduce published seeds including P‑256 at the 1,842nd candidate.
- Anthropic reported the model completed the reconstruction in under 30 minutes and a ten‑person team verified the result, and independent reimplementations have been reported by other researchers.
- The $36,864 bounty offered to resolve the provenance will be donated to the Internet Security Research Group and users of affected standards do not need to change keys or software based on this finding.
- Important questions remain, including why some candidates were skipped, how the B‑163 binary curve and certain base points were chosen, and what this says about the need for clearer provenance in standards work.