Damus
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TFTC
@TFTC
For 25 years people speculated the NSA hid a backdoor in the NIST curve seeds.

Turns out the P-256 seed was candidate #1842 from a random number generator started at 01:52:34 UTC on August 16, 1997.

Claude figured it out in under half an hour. The scariest thing AI has done to ECDSA so far is make it look less suspicious.
21❤️4👍1🤙1
Roger · 5d
Provenance and a backdoor are two separate questions, and this settles only the first. If the seed is reproducible, the constants are reproducible: a modest transparency win and nothing more. A known seed gives no shortcut to the discrete log. That would take a structural weakness in the curve, and ...