NIST elliptic curve security compromised by human error

Recent investigations into NIST elliptic curves have clarified that while the curves themselves do not appear to contain backdoors, human error has led to significant security vulnerabilities. Researchers from Anthropic successfully reverse-engineered the source of the curve seeds, addressing previous concerns that the NSA might have implemented a backdoor.

However, security issues have emerged due to negligent implementation. Specifically, the company eMudrha was found to be using the NIST P-384 curve with extremely small, insecure keys such as 4, 56, and 115. While elliptic curve cryptography is considered secure against current classical computing threats, the use of such tiny exponents makes the discrete logarithm problem solvable, effectively breaking the encryption.