Security News > 2023 > October > Bounty offered for secret NSA seeds behind NIST elliptic curves algo
A bounty of $12,288 has been announced for the first person to crack the NIST elliptic curves seeds and discover the original phrases that were hashed to generate them.
In Elliptic Curve Cryptography, seeds are values or sets of values used as the initial input for an encryption algorithm or process to produce cryptographic keys.
NIST elliptic curves, introduced in 2000 through the agency's FIPS 186-2 on 'Digital Signature Standard,' and which are crucial to modern cryptography, were generated in 1997 using seeds provided by the NSA. The curves are specified by their coefficient and a random seed value, while the deterministic process to derive the keys is transparent and verifiable to alleviate fears of hidden vulnerabilities.
Nobody knows how the original seeds were generated, but rumors and research suggest that they are hashes of English sentences provided to Solinas by the NSA. Solinas is believed to have used a hashing algorithm, probably SHA-1, to generate the seeds and presumably forgot about the phrases forever.
"The NIST elliptic curves that power much of modern cryptography were generated in the late '90s by hashing seeds provided by the NSA. How were the seeds generated?," reads a blog post by Valsorda.
The security implications that arise from the concerns that the NSA intentionally selected weak curves are dire, and finding the original sentences used to generate them would dispel these concerns once and for all.