Claude unpicks an NSA mystery behind Ethereum passkey security

Anthropic said on Oct. 16 that Claude had helped reconstruct the public seed behind P-256, a NIST-standardized cryptographic curve supported for Ethereum passkey signing. The finding gives wallet builders new evidence about a longstanding concern over the curve’s origins. The seed is a public design input used to derive a coefficient in the curve’s equation. It is separate from the private signing credentials that authorize wallet activity. Anthropic says unexplained seeds supplied by the U.S. National Security Agency had fueled suspicion about deliberately weakened parameters. The company’s published recipe initializes the old C-library generator lrand48 with the timestamp for Aug. 16, 1997, at 01:52:34 UTC. The generator produces a sequence of candidate seeds. Advancing to candidate 1,842 returns the published P-256 value, providing a repeatable recipe for that public constant.

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