Claude traces NIST cryptographic seeds to 1990s random-number generator

Claude has traced the origin of several NIST elliptic-curve cryptographic seeds back to a random-number generator from the 1990s. The work reproduced how the seeds were generated without uncovering any weakness in the curves themselves. This resolves a long-running provenance question that had lingered over the standards.

The reproduction did not find a flaw in the cryptographic material. Instead, it closed a gap in the historical record by showing exactly how the original values were produced. The methods and outputs are fully reproducible, which allows other researchers to verify the chain of evidence independently.

The result demonstrates how AI agents can accelerate code archaeology when the process is transparent and repeatable. By reconstructing the generation pathway, the work provides a template for auditing other foundational software artifacts where documentation is incomplete or missing.