Yet another Hacker News

The NIST Elliptic Curves Seeds Bounty Has Been Claimed

39 points aburan28 1 hour ago 7 comments

MisterTea 1 hour ago | parent

> 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.

john_strinlai 51 minutes ago | parent

it would have been beneficial to disclose the origin.

lying for obfuscation purposes makes zero sense given what we know now.

28571611 48 minutes ago | parent

"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.

mswphd 44 minutes ago | parent

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?

McGlockenshire 38 minutes ago | parent

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.

dang 44 minutes ago | parent

Related ongoing thread:

Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50122800 - Oct 2026 (91 comments)

ignoramous 18 minutes ago | parent

> I accept suggestions for other seed-based swag.

Obfuscated, self-evaluating bash script by CDN Akamai being supplied to consumers via retail stores, https://tris.sherliker.net/blog/obfuscated-self-evaluating-b... / https://archive.vn/DI4NS / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48829312