It’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.
replyI 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.
replyIf they did know, they could have handed over these timestamps 15 years ago and put the issue to bed.
It was a very different time back then.
replyWhat was so different, culturally?
replyWell the thing that comes to mind for me was the US gov classing encryption as a munition and placing it under export controls
replyThat was more early-mid 1990s, and not so much late-90s and early 2000s, when the NIST/NSA issues came about (from what I understand)
replyIf they deny everything they didn't do, then whatever they don't deny will stand out.
reply"independent cryptography community" - I actually LOLed at this
replyI don't think that "community" would accept any kind of answer as truthful so why waste the time...
It’s independently verifiable. What do you mean?
replySo is Earth's sphericity.
replyOne of the top comments in this very thread suggests the seed timestamps were maybe selected specifically for purpose.
replyThank god NIST gifted us Dual_EC_DRBG, so I still have a NIST Elliptic Curve effort I can sneer at dismissively.
replyRSA was good enough for my grandfather, and it's good enough for me.