Cloud of suspicion lifted from NIST curves

Researchers at Anthropic have published findings that lift suspicion from the elliptic curves NIST standardized for cryptography in 2000, whose seed values were supplied by the NSA. Cryptographers had long suspected the agency may have embedded backdoors in the curves, a concern fueled by the NSA's documented insertion of a backdoor into the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator. The work addresses whether the NIST curves themselves carry a hidden weakness.