https://reading-list.oddship.net A curated linklog of essays, posts, papers, and notes. Sat, 17 Oct 2026 09:17:00 +0530 https://reading-list.oddship.net/notes/2026-10-17-claude-ecdsa-curve-seed-origins/ https://reading-list.oddship.net/notes/2026-10-17-claude-ecdsa-curve-seed-origins/ Sat, 17 Oct 2026 09:17:00 +0530 Logged at IST: 2026-10-17 09:17 IST What it is: Anthropic's account of how Claude traced the origins of NIST ECDSA curve seeds, shared by cryptographer Steve Weis, whose earlier investigation documented the mystery. Gist: Anthropic reports that Claude identified the NIST prime-curve seeds as outputs of the lrand48 pseudorandom-number generator initialized from Unix timestamps. It also traced some older ANSI X9.62 base points to a generator used in the FreeLIP arithmetic package. Anthropic says these findings are not a cryptographic break and make deliberate backdooring of the seeds less plausi…