Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta

3d ago

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The NSA mathematician who made the numbers protecting your passkeys died in 2023 without ever remembering how he made them. Cryptographers chased the answer for years and put up a $36,864 bounty. Claude figured it out in under 30 minutes, and the answer was the clock on his computer. His name was Jerry Solinas. Back in 1997 he generated the starting numbers for P-256 and a few sibling curves, the math underneath your passkeys and a big chunk of the secure websites you visit every day. NIST published them in 2000 with no explanation of where they came from, and for a long time people mostly shrugged. Then 2013 happened. The Snowden files showed the NSA had slipped a backdoor into a different crypto standard, and suddenly every unexplained number the agency had ever handed out looked suspicious. These were the most widely used ones of all. Jerry's own story was that he'd hashed a joke sentence, something along the lines of "Give Bob and Jerry a raise," and then lost it when his work…