Ding, ding. Round 1. It’s ECC v RSA

Public key encryption continues its strive to be the foundation of a new world. It is the core answer to many security problems, such as in proving identity and in creating a more trustworthy world. But should we use RSA or ECC?

Well, let’s put them head-to-head on my desktop (Macbook Pro), my iPad, and on my mobile phone (Samsung S9+). For this we will run all the code in the browser using JavaScript. There will be no back-end calls here, and all the maths will be computed in the browser.

And let’s be fair with them and use equivalent security levels. For ECC, 160 bit keys are equivalent to 1,204 bit RSA keys:

So let’s try creating a 160-bit ECC key pair and a 1,024 bit RSA key pair.

ECC

For ECC we can create a random number and G point, and multiply them together to get a public key value. If I run on my Samsung S9+, I get a time of 113ms [here]: