{
  "id": 15083716,
  "title": "Claude Traced the NIST Curve Seeds to a 1997 Clock and lrand48. Nothing to Rotate on P-256",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/17/claude-traced-the-nist-curve-seeds-to-a-1997-clock-and-lrand48",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-10-17T01:02:01.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/gabrielanhaia/claude-traced-the-nist-curve-seeds-to-a-1997-clock-and-lrand48-nothing-to-rotate-on-p-256-50d3"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Claude Traced the NIST Curve Seeds to a 1997 Clock and lrand48. The seeds behind P-256, the curve used in ES256 signatures on JWTs, were not generated from a hash of a secret NSA sentence. Instead, they originated from the C library's lrand48 random-number generator, seeded with a Unix timestamp, between May 1997 and April 1998. Anthropic's write-up from October 16 revealed that an internal research model deduced this in under half an hour. The cryptographer who ran a bounty on the question confirmed the claim by reimplementing the algorithm in Go to verify it. Notably, there is no action required to address this issue, as Anthropic's post confirms there is no action to be taken or things to do differently. The story provides a settled argument from the late 1990s and a reason to verify what mints your session tokens.",
  "summary": "Book: System Design Pocket Guide: Interviews The series: Pocket Guides for Developers — 8 short books on agents, RAG, prompts, observability, events, databases and system design — the whole series My project: Hermes IDE | GitHub — an IDE for developers who ship with Claude Code and other AI coding tools Me: xgabriel.com | GitHub The seeds behind P-256, the curve under every ES256 signature on a…",
  "key_points": [
    "NIST curve seeds traced to 1997 clock and lrand48 random-number generator",
    "Seeds originated from Unix timestamp between May 1997 and April 1998",
    "No action required to address the issue, as confirmed by Anthropic's post"
  ],
  "editors_take": "The ability of AI models to deduce historical cryptographic origins signals a shift where machine reasoning can uncover long-hidden patterns in legacy security standards without requiring immediate remediation.",
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}