As A Researcher … You Have To Know Where We Have Been …

As a good researcher, you don’t just dwell on the current methods, you must know your horizon. But equally, you should know how we got to where we are. It is a timeline of discoveries and enhancement, each making something better. But that memory is important as you sometimes have to bring back methods from the past and try them with new challenges.

As a researcher, I love reading new papers, but I only love reading some of the classics of the paper. These papers were often true break-through, and are often much easier to read than the overblown papers of the current time. A great paper of the past often had just a few references and a very short abstract, and would probably struggle to get past reviewers these days looking for many citations, and complex representations of maths.

And so we have our “standard” digital signature methods that use RSA and Elliptic Curve techniques, but let’s dive into another one from the past: Feige-Fiat-Shamir:

On Page 10, we have: