NIST P-256 Seed Mystery Solved by AI

The Unexplained Seed

For more than two decades, the seed behind the NIST P-256 elliptic curve was a mystery. Researchers from Anthropic now say they know. Using the Claude AI model, they traced the seed to a garden-variety random number generator that was started on August 16, 1997, at 01:52:34 UTC.

The Discovery

According to the Anthropic findings, the P-256 seed was produced by lrand48/drand48, a POSIX-standard pseudorandom number generator. The generator had been seeded with a Unix timestamp, 871696354, which converts to that August 1997 date.

Implications

The pattern held across other curves too. Seeds for the prime curves P-192, P-224, P-384 and P-521 matched timestamps falling between May 1997 and April 1998. Seeds for the binary curves showed patterns consistent with timestamps from either February 1984 or April 1998.

The Future of Cryptography

The core finding is reassuring. The analysis found no evidence of intentional cryptographic weaknesses in how the seeds were produced. A backdoored curve would require its designer to search through a huge number of seeds until finding one with a hidden, exploitable property.

AI in Cryptography

A question that stumped human researchers for decades was answered by a model that recognized how 1990s software tended to behave. That suggests other legacy mysteries in cryptography, the ones buried in old standards and undocumented parameters, could be worth revisiting with similar tools.

Conclusion

The discovery means for internet security is reassuring. The seeds were not produced using the kind of transparent, 'nothing up my sleeve' methodology that modern cryptographers prefer. They came from an ordinary tool, started at an arbitrary moment, with the details apparently never written down for the public.