Claude Traces the Origin of NSA's ECDSA Seeds in 30 Minutes

Anthropic attributes the origin of the ECDSA curve seeds provided by the NSA to lrand48, initialized by a Unix timestamp between May 1997 and April 1998. According to Anthropic, this discovery makes intentional backdoors less likely. The company is donating the reward of $36,864 to the Internet Security Research Group.

Anthropic considers backdoors less likely and donates the reward

Anthropic believes that identifying a single source for the seeds makes deliberate backdoors less plausible. The company is donating the reward of $36,864 to the Internet Security Research Group. This mystery had sparked a bounty and amateur investigations. ECDSA is described as the most widely used framework for elliptic curve digital signatures.

Claude links the seeds to lrand48 and a 1997-1998 timestamp

Claude solved the puzzle in under 30 minutes by determining that the seeds originated from lrand48, a pseudo-random number generator in C, which was initialized based on a Unix timestamp between May 1997 and April 1998. The model found that lrand48 generates only 31 bits, meaning that the most significant bits of certain seeds were always zero.

A cryptographic mystery since the 2000 standardization

In 2000, during the standardization of several curves as part of ECDSA, the NSA provided the seeds without specifying their generation method. This lack of explanation fueled suspicions of potential backdoors. Jerry Solinas, a former NSA employee, had suggested that these values could be the hash of a humorous phrase, a hypothesis that turned out to be false.