Anthropic says Claude identified the seed sources of five NIST elliptic curves in half an hour

According to Anthropic's disclosure, Claude took less than half an hour to determine how the seeds for NIST's five standard elliptic curves (P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384, P-521) were generated: the seeds came from the lrand48 pseudorandom number generator in a 1990s C library, initialized with a Unix timestamp. Claude wrote a scanning program to check the binary digits of the public seeds bit by bit, tested 34 combinations of generators and output truncation methods, and found that the highest bits of the 20 32-bit integers split from four groups of seeds were all 0, thereby pinpointing lrand48, and then used the LLL lattice basis reduction algorithm to recover the truncated state. Tracing back the initialization input of srand48 yielded a time range from May 1997 to April 1998; for P-256, this corresponds to August 16, 1997, UTC 01:52:34, and taking the 1842nd candidate group yielded a seed starting with C49D. The previously circulated claim was that the seeds came from the hash of a salary-increase joke password, and the bounty initiator has independently verified this result.