Comment by TedDoesntTalk

1 day ago

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.

4 comments

TedDoesntTalk

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pbsd  1 day ago

That is mentioned in a years old post: https://saweis.net/posts/nist-curve-seed-origins.html

  • ealexhudson  15 hours ago

    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...

    • pbsd  9 hours ago

      The first version of the X9.62-1998 standard, where these curves first showed up, only had P-192, P-256, and the prime192v{1,2,3} and prime239v{1,2,3} curves. These also happen to be the curves with the earliest timestamps (along with P-384 and P-521). It also contained 163-bit curves, but none of those correspond to the later B-163 curve.

      So yeah, it seems plausible P-224 and the B-* curves were generated at a later date.