Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins

Anthropic's Claude AI discovered that the origins of ECDSA curve seeds, a decades-long mystery in cryptography, were simply generated using the C library's lrand48 random-number generator seeded with Unix timestamps rather than hashing a humorous passphrase as previously believed. The NIST adopted these elliptic curves in 2000 without explaining their provenance, sparking speculation about whether the NSA-provided seeds contained hidden weaknesses, though researchers generally trusted them. The finding closes a longstanding open question but requires no changes to existing cryptographic practices.