“It’s just timestamps”: the decades-old mystery of the origins of one of the most popular cryptographic standards has been explained.
We pursued this long-standing open question of the cryptographic community to settle concerns about ECDSA, which is one of our most widely used cryptographic standards.
Readers should take this as a fun closing chapter and the end of years of speculation. There is no action to be taken or things to do differently. Most researchers trusted the curves already. Enjoy.
ECDSA is the most widely used elliptic curve cryptography standard. It was adopted by NIST in 2000 as part of the FIPS 186-2 Digital Signature Standard which lists a set of standard elliptic curves of varying sizes and security levels. For curves over prime and binary fields, the specifications published a “seed” parameter whose hash value is used to define the coefficient b of the curve. The provenance of these seeds has been a long-standing question, as they were provided by the NSA with no explanation or justification. As an example, the NIST P-256 curve seed was SEED = C49D3608 86E70493 6A6678E1 139D26B7 819F7E90 with no information where it came from.
