ANNOUNCING THE $12K NIST ELLIPTIC CURVES SEEDS BOUNTY

Filippo Valsorda announces a bounty of $8,192 (12,288 in the text's Ki$ notation of 12 Ki$, with the total stated as $12K in the title) for finding the pre-seeds behind the seeds of five prime-order NIST elliptic curves: P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384, and P-521. The seeds were provided by the NSA and generated in 1997 by Jerry Solinas, who has since died, and he told the author he hashed an English sentence with SHA-1 but could not recover the exact phrase. Half the bounty goes to the first submission of at least one pre-seed, and the other half to the first submission of all five, with the option to donate the cash to a U.S. 501(c)(3) charity for triple the amount.