> NSA: Use our curves. They were selected randomly. Promise, wink wink.
Here's a better explanation about this cryptic tweet:
Backdoors in NIST elliptic curves
Of particular concern are the NIST standard elliptic curves. There is a concern that these were some-how “cooked” to facilitate an NSA backdoor into elliptic curve cryptography. The suspicion is that while the vast majority of elliptic curves are secure, these ones were deliberately chosen as having a mathematical weakness known only to the NSA.
I’m not a bernsteintheist, but I must be a little bit of one after all, because I was like “hey, he went to a lot of work to show he had nothing up his sleeve..”
Lisper here says that he wished for a serious writeup, I agree — right now this is a set of in-jokes; it would make a fantastic Quanta Magazine article, or two, or n..
Shor: Are you sure?
NSA: Antoine Joux > Quantum Computers, Like him!
Crown Sterling: We sell CADO-NFS™ for breaking ECDSA of Nakamoto's funny money.
To be continued ...
I wish I could find a good primer on elliptic integrals. They come up constantly in magnetic fields and are impractically hard to solve. I mean you can do it, and I've seen it done, but give myself 5% odds of pulling it off myself. My feeling is that this is why only a handful of magnetic field equations are provided in textbooks.
Utterly brilliant!
A great mathematical mind -- meets a great ability to summarize the works of previous mathematicians (not easy to do!)!
Worth re-reading in the future!
This is cute, but I would much rather see this history written out as a serious non-tweety article. There is a ton of fascinating and useful information hiding underneath the humor.