United StatesThe National Security Agency’s mystery seeds were 1997 timestamps.
Anthropic says that makes a hidden weakness in the US government’s curves much less likely.
An Anthropic model matched P-256’s published seed at the 1,842nd candidate of lrand48, an old C library random-number generator.
Anthropic’s team still cannot explain why the program passed over some usable candidates.
Bitcoin’s secp256k1 curve is unaffected, but no one can say when a quantum computer will threaten it.
How each outlet framed it
- CoinDesk
- traces the NSA-supplied curve numbers to a random-number program seeded with 1997-98 timestamps, and notes bitcoin's secp256k1 was unaffected
Sources: CoinDesk