Claude solves the 25-year-old mystery surrounding the seeds of the NSA’s curve parameters. Anthropic claims that an internal Claude model traced the origin of the seeds—provided by the NSA—for five NIST elliptic curves in under half an hour, linking them to the C library’s `lrand48` random number generator, which uses Unix timestamps as its seed. According to Anthropic, this does not constitute a cryptographic vulnerability and makes the existence of a hidden backdoor far less plausible. Notably, Bitcoin uses `secp256k1`, not an NIST curve. See the tweet below (2022), which shows that Bitcoin is not compromised, as it does not rely on these curves—again, it uses `secp256k1`. I’ve also included a thread of interesting tweets on this topic and why it has been so important for hardware wallets...