GoKawiilAnthropic team cracks origin of NIST elliptic curve seeds, claims $36,864 bounty
A group of Anthropic researchers discovered that the mysterious seed values behind NIST's P-192 through P-521 elliptic curves were generated using the POSIX drand48 random number generator seeded with a 1997-98 Unix timestamp, not from hashed English sentences as long believed. They claimed the full bounty offered three years ago for solving the puzzle and chose to donate it to the Internet Security Research Group, which runs Let's Encrypt, tripling its value to $36,864.
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The finding closes a decades-old mystery in cryptographic history and, according to the bounty's organizer, reinforces confidence that the widely used NIST curves were generated through an unremarkable, non-malicious process rather than a deliberately chosen or manipulated seed. It also corrects the long-held belief that the late NIST mathematician Jerry Solinas had used hashed sentences, showing how institutional memory about foundational cryptographic standards can be unreliable over time.
- The NIST elliptic curve seeds came from drand48 seeded with a 1997-98 timestamp, not hashed sentences as previously believed.
- Anthropic researchers solved the three-year-old bounty and donated the full $36,864 prize to Let's Encrypt's parent nonprofit, ISRG.
- The discovery helps validate that the seed generation process for widely used cryptographic curves was not secretly manipulated.
Source: words.filippo.io, 2026-10-16
Published there as: “The NIST Elliptic Curves Seeds Bounty Has Been Claimed”
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