The NIST Elliptic Curves Seeds Bounty Has Been Claimed
Researchers from Anthropic have solved a long-standing cryptographic mystery by identifying how the seeds for NIST elliptic curves were generated in the late 1990s. The discovery confirms the use of a standard random number generator seeded with a UNIX timestamp.
Why it matters
This provides historical closure on the integrity of widely used cryptographic standards, reinforcing trust in digital security primitives.
We now know how the seeds of the NIST elliptic curves were generated: they’re not the hash of some saucy sentence, but the output of drand48 seeded with the time, which was indeed in 1997–98.
John Wood, Henry de Valence, Ava Howell, Zack Voase, Lucy Sweet, Amir Omidi, Paul Crowley, Iain McGinniss, Nicholas Carlini, and Steve Weis from Anthropic solved the riddle and on October 15th, 2026, at 01:07:51 UTC, claimed the full bounty I announced three years ago . They chose to donate the prize to ISRG , the non-profit that operates Let’s Encrypt, tripling its value to $36,864 (36 Ki$). Thank you to Amir Omidi, Chris Palmer, Colm MacCárthaigh, David Adrian, David Anderson, Jeff Hodges, Matt Green, Matthew McPherrin, Paul Kehrer, Ryan Sleevi, and Soatok for contributing to the bounty.
This helps fill out a page of cryptographic history, and reinforces our confidence in these critical cryptographic primitives.
Get smarter about the news
Sign up free for a feed built around what you actually care about, Dive Deeper research on any story, and the full text of every article.
Create free accountAlready have an account? Sign in