He Basically Secured The Internet: Peter Montgomery, RIP

Much of the core security of our current world is built on the amazing work done by individuals in the 1980s. It is to Ron Rivest (including RSA, digital signatures, and MD5), Adi Shamir (including RSA, Shamir Sharing, Cryptoanalysis, and Zero-Knowledge Proofs), Whitfield Diffie (the Diffie-Hellman method), Ralph Merkle (Merkle Trees) and many others, that we turn to for our core security.

At the forefront of this was Peter Montgomery and who died on 18 Feb 2020. Peter was previously a researcher in Microsoft Research, and in his amazing career he created Montgomery multiplication, Montgomery elliptic curves, and the Montgomery ladder. Here is one of his classic papers [here]:

One of Peter’s great contributions, too, is the Montgomery Ladder [here][1]:

The core of security on the Internet …

The core of the security on the Web comes down to … elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). With the ECDH (Elliptic Curve Diffie…