Comment by sweis
2 days ago
The two people were Bob Reiter and Jerry Solinas. Jerry wrote in a 2015 email to Daniel Bernstein that he thought it was a hash of the passphrase. I corroborated that story with 4 people, including two ex-NSA folks off the record.
Everyone was wrong!
I wasn't able to reach Bob. He was working in private industry as of 2018, but never responded.
Kind of sus that they would spread a rumor that its a phrase. This isnt something I would forget, or confuse with a timestamp..
It's possible that this "phrase hash" method was used for a different case - like another, unrelated and possibly unreleased algorithm. And then it was confused for the one used for those curves.
There is one that Claude couldn't find perhaps that is from the phrase.
But I do agree, it is unusual actually that the code was lost.
It is also unusual that they didn't include how they derived the seed, and weren't forced to pick a randomly generated one.
I guess these are all things that would happen today but this was not so long ago to my mind so it is a surprise it didn't happen!
One possibility is that they created multiple seeds, and misremembered which one they eventually went with. Although, it's weird no one ever said "or it might have been a timestamp".
Exactly what the NSA would say.
Maybe that explanation covers the rest that wasn’t identified?
or they were lying...