Jerry Solinas

NSA mathematician who generated the NIST curve seeds (1997-98)

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Anthropic team solves NIST curve seed mystery, claims bounty

Deceased; died early 2023 without disclosing the method

After 26 years, the mystery of how the NIST elliptic curve parameters were chosen is solved. The seeds were not hashes of secret phrases, as colleagues believed the late NSA mathematician Jerry Solinas had used; they came from a standard Unix random number generator seeded with timestamps from 1997-98.

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