“It’s just timestamps”: the decades-old mystery of the origins of one of the most popular cryptographic standards has been explained.

We pursued this long-standing open question of the cryptographic community to settle concerns about ECDSA, which is one of our most widely used cryptographic standards.

Readers should take this as a fun closing chapter and the end of years of speculation. There is no action to be taken or things to do differently. Most researchers trusted the curves already. Enjoy.