“The NIST elliptic curves that power much of modern cryptography were generated in the late ‘90s by hashing seeds provided by the NSA.”
P-256 and P-384 sit under the ECDSA certificates that secure much of the web. The seeds came from NSA’s Jerry Solinas hashing English sentences he later forgot, on a machine that was later replaced. The bounty is $12,288 to crack five SHA-1 hashes. A quarter century of web crypto rests on a password nobody wrote down.