‘Wow, it’s a real discovery’: Claude cracks a 25-year NSA number mystery
Numbers the spy agency handed over in the 1990s, long suspected of hiding a backdoor, turn out to have come from a basic computer program. Bitcoin was never on that list, and its quantum problem hasn’t gone anywhere.
The mystery regarding the origin of certain seed parameters used in the widely used ECDSA cryptographic standard has been explained. These seeds, which were provided by the NSA without explanation or justification, were long suspected of potentially hiding a backdoor. Techmeme reports that the numbers actually came from a basic computer program and are simply timestamps.
The seeds were part of the FIPS 186-2 Digital Signature Standard adopted by NIST in 2000. For curves over prime and binary fields, the specifications published a seed parameter used to define the coefficient b of the curve. While the provenance of these seeds had been a long-standing question in the cryptographic community, Techmeme states there is no need for action or changes to be made, noting that most researchers already trusted the curves.
CoinDesk notes that Bitcoin was not included on the list of numbers provided by the spy agency in the 1990s and that the quantum problem facing Bitcoin remains.
Brief written by urgent.news from CoinDesk, Techmeme — 2 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
