"This helps fill out a page of cryptographic history, and reinforces our confidence in these critical cryptographic primitives."
Typical Valsorda. Even the Anthropic article states the timestamps could have been selected and the whole thing could be a "proof" that the NSA does not have a magic number up their sleeve.
why though? in particular if the NSA wanted to hide their nefarious intent here, why wouldn't they use something stronger than an LCG so the question for how they're generated remained open forever?
Related ongoing thread:
Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50122800 - Oct 2026 (91 comments)
"This helps fill out a page of cryptographic history, and reinforces our confidence in these critical cryptographic primitives."
Typical Valsorda. Even the Anthropic article states the timestamps could have been selected and the whole thing could be a "proof" that the NSA does not have a magic number up their sleeve.
why though? in particular if the NSA wanted to hide their nefarious intent here, why wouldn't they use something stronger than an LCG so the question for how they're generated remained open forever?
What's more likely, the random calls were made at those times, or that someone changed the numbers to make it look like they were made at those times?
Only one of those requires a conspiracy theory-tainted brain to think up.
> Turns out memory can play tricks on everyone: we now know they were instead generated with the POSIX-standard drand48 random number generator.
Or he lied to obfuscate the origin.
it would have been beneficial to disclose the origin.
lying for obfuscation purposes makes zero sense given what we know now.