Claude Traces NIST P-256 Curve Seeds to 1997 Random Number Generator, Solving 25-Year Cryptography Mystery

Anthropic researchers used Claude to trace the origins of NIST elliptic curve seeds back to an ordinary 1990s random-number generator, solving a quarter-century cryptography puzzle in under 30 minutes. The research, published October 16, 2026, identified that the widely-used P-256 curve's seed originated from the lrand48 function in the C standard library, initialized with a Unix timestamp from August 16, 1997, at 01:52:34 UTC. The P-256 seed was the 1,842nd candidate generated in that run.