Visualising One of the Most Beautiful Things in Cybersecurity

We love things that are beautifully crafted and design. Unfortunately the world of cybersecurity is often tainted by cybercriminals, Tor networks hiding drug dealing, and cryptocurrency mining on our computers. But there is beauty to be found, and that beauty lies in the heart of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). While some may want to spy on your every on-line action, it is ECC that is currently holding up our rights to privacy, and to properly identity our transactions and our identities.

Few things in this world holds up our rights than ECC.

You must thus thank ECC whenever you connect to your corporate wifi network, or to your VPN server in your local coffee shop. Behind them is ECC working hard in generating a new encryption key every time you connect to a Web site (ECDH), and leaving those who want to spy on us scratching their heads. And for our transactions, it is ECC again which makes sure that we properly identity senders and receivers. ECC cares little for a world build with false trust identities — such as with IBAN and CVV2 numbers — and signs for things with true digital trust.

And so we end up with these values that define an elliptic curve (p,a,b,gx,gy,n), and where a and b are the values used in: