Anthropic researchers have solved the long-standing riddle of how NIST elliptic curve seeds were generated, discovering they came from drand48 seeded with a UNIX timestamp from 1997–98 rather than hashed English sentences. The team claimed the bounty on October 15, 2026 and donated the prize to Let's Encrypt's operating non-profit ISRG. This resolves a three-year-old mystery and reinforces confidence in widely-used cryptographic primitives.
Background
The NIST P-256 and other SP 800-90A DRBG curves have been widely used in TLS, VPN, and digital signature protocols since 2000. Questions about the seed generation process persisted due to ongoing concerns about potential backdoors in NIST-standardized cryptography.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Oct 17, 2026 at 04:18 AM
- Score
- 7.0 / 10