Adam Back Says NSA Should Have Published NIST Curve Generation Steps

Blockstream CEO Adam Back said the National Security Agency (NSA) should have published reproducible steps for generating five elliptic curves standardized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), after a model reconstructed how their seeds were created. “That's NSA fault for not revealing through reproducible steps to generate their NIST published curves,” Back wrote on Oct. 17. On Oct. 16, an internal Claude model traced the seeds for NIST P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 to lrand48, a C-library random-number generator initialized with Unix timestamps. The model identified the method in less than half an hour. For P-256, candidate 1,842 matched Aug. 15, 1997, at 9:52:34 p.m. ET (Aug. 16, 1997, at 01:52:34 UTC).

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