RSA Security employees should have been aware, at least, that Dual_EC_DRBG might contain a backdoor. Three employees were members of the ANSI X9F1 Tool Standards and Guidelines Group, to which Dual_EC_DRBG had been submitted for consideration in the early 2000s. The possibility that the random number generator could contain a backdoor was "first raised in an ANSI X9 meeting", according to John Kelsey, a co-author of the NIST SP 800-90A standard that contains Dual_EC_DRBG. In January 2005, two employees of the cryptography company Certicom — they were also members of the X9F1 group — wrote a patent application that described a backdoor for Dual_EC_DRBG identical to the NSA one. The patent application also described three ways to neutralize the backdoor. Two of these — ensuring that two arbitrary elliptic curve points P and Q used in Dual_EC_DRBG are independently chosen, and a smaller output length — was added to the standard as an option, though NSA's backdoored version of P and Q and large output length remained as the standard's default option. Kelsey said he knew of no implementers who actually generated their own non-backdoored P and Q, and there have been no reports of implementations using the smaller outlet.