Comment by nickysielicki
1 day ago
It’s perplexing that NIST chose to burn so much trust and goodwill with the independent cryptography community instead of just explaining empirically that they really had nothing up their sleeve.
1 day ago
It’s perplexing that NIST chose to burn so much trust and goodwill with the independent cryptography community instead of just explaining empirically that they really had nothing up their sleeve.
I think they legitimately did not know. The person who worked on it directly, Jerry Solinas, did not remember and gave an explanation that turned out to be wrong. In his defense, multiple people told the same story about hashing a phrase that was wrong.
If they did know, they could have handed over these timestamps 15 years ago and put the issue to bed.
It was a very different time back then.
What was so different, culturally?
This was the era of export cryptography, just after the Clipper Chip saga, "this t-shirt is a munition, and perhaps most importantly curve cryptography was barely a thing (this is back at the time where people believed the Certicom patents would preclude it from deployment). I think people just weren't paying that much attention to cryptographic standards processes at all, at least not for a couple more years (remember, the curves were generated years before they were published).
2 replies →
Well the thing that comes to mind for me was the US gov classing encryption as a munition and placing it under export controls
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If they deny everything they didn't do, then whatever they don't deny will stand out.
This hardly proves the NSA has nothing up their sleeve.
If I was the NSA, I'd just make a huge rainbow table of all (timestamp hashes, passphrase hashes of every book/movie, random sentences, etc), then generate huge numbers of (seed, secret key) pairs and pick the first one that matches.
Voila. All the crypto backdoor and a side of plausible deniability if anyone decodes the seed.
Bonus points if the exact "rainbow table" algorithm couldn't recover the original seed, so that's why NSA couldn't tell us where it came from. :)
I'm more surprised a different set of numbers wasn't selected
"independent cryptography community" - I actually LOLed at this
I don't think that "community" would accept any kind of answer as truthful so why waste the time...
It’s independently verifiable. What do you mean?
One of the top comments in this very thread suggests the seed timestamps were maybe selected specifically for purpose.
4 replies →
So is Earth's sphericity.
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