alt Hacker NewsI know it has no security impact in this case, but isn’t it odd a bunch of cryptographers would choose a weak PRNG seeded by the date for a task like this?
Even state lotteries back then used physical ping pong balls and a nothing-up-my-sleeve show after the evening news.
The prolonged conspiracy theories until this discovery make some sense… not having a ceremony around anything supposedly “random” is unexpected, even back in the 1990s.
No, it's not odd. This isn't a task for which a cryptographically secure random number is needed. In fact, it's closer to the kind of task where you want the opposite thing (a deterministic random number generator, like you'd use for a simulation).
The starting point for finding a curve coefficient is totally arbitrary (so long as the math on the resulting curve equation checks out). Competing curves use mathematical constants like pi and e to do the same thing. It's simply a number everyone has to agree on; it has no other significance.