Security· ★★★· neutral·

Anthropic: Claude traces origins of NIST ECDSA curve seeds

  • —Seeds for P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 were outputs of the lrand48 generator
  • —The P-256 seed matched candidate 1842 from a run starting 1997-08-16 01:52:34 UTC
  • —Other prime-curve seeds matched timestamps between May 1997 and April 1998
  • —The $36,864 bounty will be donated to the Internet Security Research Group
Why it matters: Clearing long-standing suspicions of a deliberate backdoor in the ECDSA standard reduces reputational risk for the cryptography underpinning Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Source: Blockchain.News