The NIST Elliptic Curves Seeds Bounty Has Been Claimed

Filippo Valsorda, a cryptographic researcher, has won a $100,000 bounty from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for cracking the NIST Elliptic Curves Seeds challenge. The challenge was launched in 2019 to test the security of elliptic curve cryptography used in cryptographic standards. Valsorda used a combination of computational power and mathematical reasoning to find the secret seeds, which are a set of 15-bit binary strings. He spent over 3,000 hours of computational time and made use of a custom-built machine learning model to narrow down the search space.