GoKawiilAnthropic's Claude AI traces NIST ECDSA curve seeds to UTC timestamps
Anthropic reports that its Claude AI model helped determine the origin of mysterious 'seed' values used to generate NIST's standard elliptic curves for ECDSA, a widely used cryptographic signature standard. The seeds, published without explanation by the NSA in 2000, were long rumored to derive from a humorous passphrase chosen by NSA employee Jerry Solinas, but the analysis found they actually correspond to UTC timestamps.