Anthropic · Claude · NIST · anthropic.com
Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins
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“It’s timestamps”: the decades-old mystery of the origins of one of the most popular cryptographic standards has been explained.
Key facts
- It was adopted by NIST in 2000 as part of the FIPS 186-2 Digital Signature Standard which lists a set of standard elliptic curves of varying sizes and security levels
- In under half an hour, Claude discovered the origins of the NIST P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 seeds
- The base points of the six curves generated in May 1997 (P-192 and the five ANSI X9.62 example curves prime192v2, prime192v3 and prime239v1 to v3) come from the random number generator in FreeLIP
- So, the first 20 bytes are candidate 1, the next 20 bytes are candidate 2
Summary
The team pursued this long-standing open question of the cryptographic community to settle concerns about ECDSA, which is one of their most widely used cryptographic standards. Readers should take this as a fun closing chapter and the end of years of speculation. ECDSA is the most widely used elliptic curve cryptography standard. It was adopted by NIST in 2000 as part of the FIPS 186-2 Digital Signature Standard which lists a set of standard elliptic curves of varying sizes and security levels. Neal Koblitz and Alfred Menezes wrote an excellent summary on this controversy, “ A Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma ”, which discusses the history and concerns around the seed values.