Comment by cowlby
1 day ago
For fun, give Opus 5.5 the initial hint and watch it work through it:
"There's a curiosity I noticed in the seeds of the ECDSA curve origins. You see the 1st digit is never over 7, which means that the left most bit is never over 0. lrand48() returns 31 bit numbers u know? So what if those 4 seeds were built from lrand48 or something. If they're built from 31 bit numbers on per 32 bit word that explains the pattern. Wonder if there's some other insight you might have beyond this"
I gave Open 5.5 high your hint. This was the most interesting output:
'Side curiosity: many of the SECG/X9.62 seeds contain the ASCII text 4D696E6768756151 75 = "MinghuaQu" (a Certicom researcher), sometimes shifted by half a byte.'
I don't see any mention of that in the article.
That is mentioned in a years old post: https://saweis.net/posts/nist-curve-seed-origins.html
Off your direct point, but I found this line in the article interesting: ""Jerry Solinas did provide the seeds to me sometime in Fall 1997."
The seed for P-224 uses a timestamp from 1998, and they also said the four binary curve seeds were timestamps from 1984 that were doubled - someone did srand48(time / 2) not srand48(time).
Did the P-224 seed get updated later / was not provided in 1997, or is there some other reason for this? Otherwise, it looks like one third of these values need additional excuses to get them to map to the time range in question...
1 reply →
this has been known for some time: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5469657.10
What if you omit the mention of lrand48?