Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins
The gist
Anthropic said its Claude AI model found how the NIST P-192 to P-521 curve seeds were generated.
The seeds underpin widely used ECDSA cryptography, so the finding addresses long-standing trust questions.
How it unfolded
- 2000ECDSA was adopted by NIST as part of the FIPS 186-2 Digital Signature Standard, which lists standard elliptic curves of varying sizes and security levels.
- 2015Jerry Solinas, a longtime NSA employee, said the best story was that he generated the seeds using a hash of a humorous passphrase, and that Bob Reiter actually wrote the code.
- 2023Jerry Solinas died, and other colleagues at the time were not responsive, leaving open the question of how the seeds were originally derived.