Claude traces NSA cryptographic seeds to timestamp generator

Anthropic's internal research version of Claude artificial intelligence model has traced the origins of five cryptographic parameters from the US National Security Agency (NSA) back to a conventional C programming language pseudorandom number generator. The model identified the parameters as outputs from this generator, which was initialised using Unix timestamps.

The investigation, conducted by Anthropic researchers, took less than 30 minutes and did not reveal any vulnerabilities that would require changes to existing security systems. The findings concern five elliptic curves, P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384, and P-521, which are included in standards issued by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The research team reconstructed the sequence of values generated by the software random-number generator, demonstrating that the published seeds could be reproduced using timestamps from the late 1990s. This discovery does not constitute a cryptographic attack but rather offers a testable explanation for the seeds' selection process, which had never been documented publicly.

The distinction is important as the seeds help determine mathematical parameters used by the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), which enables systems to authenticate digital signatures and verify the integrity of electronic messages, software, and transactions.

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