Ding-ding. It’s secp256k1 and Curve 25519 in Red Corner and NIST in the Blue Corner
It’s a battle for the protection of the Internet (and its users)
The world of security has its foundation in the usage of encryption, and Cybercrime thrives because we have build such an untrusted digital world. We secure data with encryption, prove its integrity using encryption, and also prove identities with encryption.
In our modern world, encryption should provide the foundation layer of the Internet, in the same way that we never consider living in a house without a lock on the door. And at the core of this security is the magic of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and prime numbers.
With symmetric key methods, such as AES and DES, we define the security strength by the number of bits in the key. For most purposes a 128-bit key is strong enough, as it would take all of the energy on the planet to crack just a single key. For public key encryption, such as with ECC and RSA, the strength is often defined by the length of the prime number used. For RSA, we have very long prime numbers, such as with 2,048 bits, but with ECC, we have relatively small primes, such as with 256 bits. A 256-bit ECC key, for example, is as strong as a 3,072-bit RSA key.
