Labels for Consumer IoT Devices? Cisco’s View

In its August 10, 2023, Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on Cybersecurity Labeling for Internet of Things (IoT), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) asked some intriguing questions about how to improve consumer confidence and understanding of the security of IoT devices. The NPRM seeks input on whether and how the FCC should establish a cybersecurity […]

October 23, 2023
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Bounty to Recover NIST’s Elliptic Curve Seeds

This is a fun challenge:

The NIST elliptic curves that power much of modern cryptography were generated in the late ’90s by hashing seeds provided by the NSA. How were the seeds generated? Rumor has it that they are in turn hashes of English sentences, but the person who picked them, Dr. Jerry Solinas, passed away in early 2023 leaving behind a cryptographic mystery, some conspiracy theories, and an historical password cracking challenge.

So there’s a $12K prize to recover the hash seeds.

Some backstory:

Some of the backstory here (it’s the funniest fucking backstory ever): it’s lately been circulating—though I think this may have been somewhat common knowledge among practitioners, though definitely not to me—that the “random” seeds for the NIST P-curves, generated in the 1990s by Jerry Solinas at NSA, were simply SHA1 hashes of some variation of the string “Give Jerry a raise”…

October 12, 2023
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