Jerry Solinas

NSA mathematician who generated the NIST curve seeds (1997-98)

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Last updated Nov 1, 2026

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Anthropic team solves NIST curve seed mystery, claims bounty

New Capabilities

Deceased; died early 2023 without disclosing the method

The seed numbers behind NIST's elliptic curves came from the C library's lrand48 random number generator, seeded with Unix timestamps from 1997 and 1998. The long-running tip that they were hashes of a humorous phrase was wrong.

Updated Nov 1