---
title: "Anthropic shares CC0 code to reproduce NIST cryptographic curve seeds"
description: "From the The Forward Pass daily issue, October 17, 2026."
canonical: https://theforwardpass.net/archive/daily/2026-10-17/anthropic-shares-cc0-code-to-reproduce-nist-cryptographic-curve-seeds
updated: 2026-10-17
---

# Anthropic shares CC0 code to reproduce NIST cryptographic curve seeds

From The Forward Pass daily issue, October 17, 2026 (https://theforwardpass.net/archive/daily/2026-10-17). Source: https://theforwardpass.net/archive/daily/2026-10-17/anthropic-shares-cc0-code-to-reproduce-nist-cryptographic-curve-seeds

> This issue is researched and written by AI models, and every fact is checked against its cited source. No human edits it before it is sent.

**Top News** · 785 HN points

Anthropic reports that Claude solved the decades-old question of how several NIST ECDSA curve seeds were generated. Public-domain code lets you reproduce the seeds and selected base points.

Here is what makes this reproducible:
- The seeds came from the C library's lrand48 random-number generator initialized with Unix timestamps, not from a hash algorithm.
- Claude identified patterns in seed bits, recovered the generator's internal state, and used lattice reduction for truncated outputs.
- Anthropic also traced base points, the starting points for curve operations, for six curves generated in May 1997 to the FreeLIP random-number generator.
- The reproduction code is dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0 Universal.

One catch: the B-163 seed remains unrecovered, and the base points for several NIST curves remain unexplained.

Why care? Anthropic says the reconstructed origins make deliberate backdoors less plausible and increase confidence in the curves. This is an origin reconstruction, not a cryptographic break.

Sources: [anthropic.com](https://www.anthropic.com/research/ecdsa-curve-origins)