[HN Gopher] Why Did Satoshi Decide to Use Secp256k1 Instead of S...
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Why Did Satoshi Decide to Use Secp256k1 Instead of Secp256r1?
Author : g42gregory
Score : 70 points
Date : 2021-10-09 21:05 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dappworks.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (dappworks.com)
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| > secp256k1 is a Koblitz curve which is defined in a
| characteristic 2 finite field,
|
| Secp256k1's base field size is a 256-bit prime. What does he
| mean?
| gizmo686 wrote:
| The bitcoin wiki explicitly says that secp256k1 is not
| characteristic 2:
|
| > secp256k1 has characteristic p, it is defined over the prime
| field Zp. Some other curves in common use have characteristic
| 2, and are defined over a binary Galois field GF(2^n), but
| secp256k1 is not one of them.
|
| https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Secp256k1
| nullc wrote:
| Garbage spam page. This shouldn't be on HN. There is a common
| trend for people to take highly technical subjects do a tiny
| amount of research and then spam up some page (often full of
| plagerism) in order to add bulk to their sites. This is
| especially common in the "defi / ico" fraud ecosystem.
|
| In this case the article is so poorly researched that even though
| it says fairly little it manages to make outright false claims
| about basic facts, e.g. "secp256k1 is a Koblitz curve which is
| defined in a characteristic 2 finite field, while secp256r1 is a
| prime field curve"-- which is false, secp256k1 uses a prime
| field.
| 0des wrote:
| Well, for one, iirc Secp256r1 was pseudo random and can be seen
| glowing in broad daylight.
| fidesomnes wrote:
| top reply of the year.
| snypher wrote:
| From here[1], even the two a,b values seem suspicious:
|
| k curve a = 0 b = 7
|
| r curve a = FFFFFFFF 00000001 00000000 00000000
| 00000000 FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFC b = 5AC635D8 AA3A93E7
| B3EBBD55 769886BC 651D06B0 CC53B0F6 3BCE3C3E 27D2604B
|
| [1]https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2018/08/21/a-tale-of-two-
| elli...
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Glowing...is this metaphorical or some industry term?
| 0des wrote:
| Saying that something 'glows in the dark' implies
| interference, so unfortunately, within cryptography, it has
| become an industry term as well as metaphor.
|
| Other examples are the 'mystery padding' in keccak vs sha3.
| stavros wrote:
| Isn't Keccak SHA3?
| 0des wrote:
| no, keccak is keccak, sha3 is keccak with NIST's mystery
| padding added in.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| I've never heard a cryptographer use "glow-in-the-dark"
| when talking about potentially fishy schemes.
|
| Source: am cryptographer
| Jensson wrote:
| I read the 3 replies and I still don't know what glowing
| means in cryptographic terms. I even tried to google it
| with cryptography added but nothing.
| ajb wrote:
| It means that the designer may have inserted an
| unpublished weakness. See also
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing-up-my-
| sleeve_number
| 0des wrote:
| As in the case of Keccak and SHA3, it doesn't necessarily
| have to be the designer, it can also be the reviewing
| committee.
| roxaaaane wrote:
| It's probably metaphorical, to mean distinguishable ?!
| And the term has never been used in crypto
| 0des wrote:
| I respectfully disagree, perhaps in your circles you have
| a point, but this is a common term.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It's imageboard/IRC slang, you won't find any
| documentation on it because it's an intentionally
| obfuscated/dogwhistle phrase intended to only 'make
| sense' to other browsers who've stuck around long enough
| to get spoonfed.
| 0des wrote:
| Using the term 'dogwhistle' seems like a divisive way to
| discount what I said. Do you care to articulate yourself
| in a way that addresses the actual substance of what I
| said, or is this it?
| metagame wrote:
| "Glowing" means that it's probably a plot of a
| government. It's not cryptography-specific.
| sva_ wrote:
| It's a reference to schizophrenic Terry Davis (rip), author
| of TempleOS, who said CIA agents would glow in the dark, and
| got popularized through the 4chan /g/ board.
|
| https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Glows%20in%2.
| ..
| serf wrote:
| weird intersection of the internet.
|
| Terry is/was an HN native, too.
|
| Upvoting all of his shadowbanned stuff that was half-way
| decent and lucid was a hobby of mine. It still makes me
| feel good to think about it.
|
| Godspeed Terry.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7818823
| jcun4128 wrote:
| I watched some of his live streams, saw some cool things
| but man the things he would say
| 0des wrote:
| If we were not meant to distinguish creation from
| creator, we'd be in a world of trouble. Also, he was
| quite ill, I'm not sure we can fault him for some of his
| mannerisms while also admiring his ambition and skill.
| 0des wrote:
| Hello fellow stranger ;)
| jfoutz wrote:
| I vouched for a few of his comments as well. I definitely
| think about how a quirk of biology or environment could
| flip the wrong switch in my brain.
|
| There are millions of sob stories. I don't do as much as
| I could, but I do more than nothing to help people out.
| That one, Terry Davis, keeps me up at night sometimes.
| 0des wrote:
| Hindsight is 20/20, all we can do is learn for next time.
| collegeburner wrote:
| Glowie refers to a fed, it started with the templeos guy but
| is more general now. Glowing means its a fed op to weaken
| crypto, kinda like the dual ec fiasco.
| [deleted]
| Strilanc wrote:
| They're saying they don't trust that the constants defining
| the curve were chosen non-maliciously. The NSA has, in the
| past, standardized protocols that contained intentional
| backdoors embedded into the constants used in the definition
| [1]. Because of things like that, it's desirable for
| cryptographic protocols to use constants chosen in some way
| that makes backdooring intractable [2].
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG
|
| 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing-up-my-sleeve_number
| pluc wrote:
| please refer to him as The Enlightened One
| woliveirajr wrote:
| > These curves were chosen actually for efficiency not security
|
| Isn't this enough?
| darig wrote:
| "efficiency" means not having to deal with federal goons and
| NDAs, and instead do what they say before your family is
| suicided.
| darthvoldemort wrote:
| I wonder if you could track down who Satoshi is based on
| someone's search queries about Secp256k1 specifically
| vbezhenar wrote:
| If he was careful, probably he would have used Tor for his
| searches.
|
| But I think that NSA-level organization knows who Satoshi is.
| It's hard to imagine how one would be able to work on such a
| project, without any background that could be tracked.
| tediousdemise wrote:
| This is dark... I bet Satoshi is also a regular user of this
| website.
| sentinel wrote:
| Any recommendations for courses or books that give a 101 intro
| all the way to understanding these curves and why / how they are
| used?
|
| I'd like to get a grasp on this from first principles. Thank you!
| roxaaaane wrote:
| Hankerson, Menezes, Vanstone [1] covers almost everything about
| Elliptic Curves and ECC (Theory and Implementation)
|
| [1]:https://cacr.uwaterloo.ca/ecc/
| [deleted]
| flixic wrote:
| This is a pretty good intro article:
| https://andrea.corbellini.name/2015/05/17/elliptic-curve-cry...
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| Wikipedia, honestly. For background math you may want to rely
| on the citations or other provided texts but a lot of articles
| have great examples sections.
|
| But... I think you need a more coherent goal than just
| "understand the math." You can superficially understand the
| math when guided, but without any reason to retain it I am not
| sure what you will gain from the experience.
| tdeck wrote:
| > You can superficially understand the math when guided, but
| without any reason to retain it I am not sure what you will
| gain from the experience.
|
| This has been my experience with almost everything I ever
| learned about math, much of which I have unfortunately not
| retained.
| Dig1t wrote:
| This blog post from Cloudflare proved incredibly useful to me
| when I was trying to understand this stuff for the first time.
| The animated gifs about halfway down the page are particularly
| useful: https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-relatively-easy-to-
| understand-...
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(page generated 2021-10-09 23:00 UTC)