alt Hacker NewsIt’s perplexing that NIST chose to burn so much trust and goodwill with the independent cryptography community instead of just explaining empirically that they really had nothing up their sleeve.
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If they deny everything they didn't do, then whatever they don't deny will stand out.
This hardly proves the NSA has nothing up their sleeve.
If I was the NSA, I'd just make a huge rainbow table of all (timestamp hashes, passphrase hashes of every book/movie, random sentences, etc), then generate huge numbers of (seed, secret key) pairs and pick the first one that matches.
Voila. All the crypto backdoor and a side of plausible deniability if anyone decodes the seed.
Bonus points if the exact "rainbow table" algorithm couldn't recover the original seed, so that's why NSA couldn't tell us where it came from. :)
I'm more surprised a different set of numbers wasn't selected
"independent cryptography community" - I actually LOLed at this
I don't think that "community" would accept any kind of answer as truthful so why waste the time...
I think they legitimately did not know. The person who worked on it directly, Jerry Solinas, did not remember and gave an explanation that turned out to be wrong. In his defense, multiple people told the same story about hashing a phrase that was wrong.
If they did know, they could have handed over these timestamps 15 years ago and put the issue to bed.