God bless you for keeping this alive.

It doesn't prove anything about the core part of the suspicion, which is they were selected using some undisclosed criteria, which may make them weaker or stronger than some other random numbers.

You are entirely familiar with the precedent of the DES s boxes of course, where that is exactly what happened.

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JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> which may make them weaker or stronger than some other random numbers

Are there non-trivial weaker and stronger seeds for this category of elliptic curves?

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fidotron 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Exactly.

When they made the changes to the s boxes for differential cryptanalysis resistance the entire concept of that was essentially secret, so who knows what they know about elliptic curves.

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matthewdgreen 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The number of weak classes of elliptic curve would have to be gargantuan for this specific search to produce some. If that many curves are bad, then ECC was a mistake.

	▲	1sha an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		drand48() could be one of hundreds of methods that were tried to produce specific values with plausible deniability and happened to produce them. The other searches were discarded.
	▲	fidotron an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Then why not turn this around and say which (hopefully small set of) specific classes of curves are known to be avoided, but otherwise have a free for all? > If that many curves are bad, then ECC was a mistake. I mean that is the logical conclusion from the behaviour around this approach where a few good things are effectively endorsed without justification. The fact is any application of an algorithm that involves so much "trust me bro" on the selection of what are a large number of opaque quasi random but not quite or provably so numbers only has as much trust in it as you have in the people that created it.

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tptacek 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Again, Koblitz and Menezes take this idea on directly in their paper. But I mean, at this point, nobody serious is going to take the P-curve seed conspiracy theory seriously ever again.