Cloud of suspicion lifted from NIST curves

(johndcook.com)

16 points | by ibobev 6 hours ago ago

5 comments

  • schiffern 4 hours ago ago

    Since when has evidence of a plausible innocuous explanation ever been enough to lift suspicion of an espionage intelligence operation?

    If I was the NSA, the most efficient use of compute power would be to generate an enormous library of innocuous hashes/seeds, then generate my secret key pairs, then find collisions. Call it the No Cloud Of Suspicion Evil Key Generator.

    Depending on the exact rainbow table used they wouldn't necessarily be able to recover the original seed generator (that would require more space, and they're already going to be stretching space limits).

    • Dylan16807 4 hours ago ago

      As explained on the previous post, when using a method like this there's not enough innocuous seeds to find bad keys. You might semi-plausibly get really lucky and find one but not this many.

    • dooglius 4 hours ago ago

      Why would they not have released the timestamp a while back then?

      • seanhunter 3 hours ago ago

        Because they work for a sigint agency. Secrecy is a way of life for them. They probably wouldn’t even tell their own children what they had for breakfast.

  • Doohickey-d 4 hours ago ago

    previously discussed; Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50122800)