Koblitz and Miller Built The Foundation of Security For Our Internet
Your online security depends fundamentally on a beautiful little curve: an elliptic curve. It has been a savour of Cybersecurity in the face of ever-increasing key sizes for RSA, and weaknesses in discrete logarithms (as used in the Diffie-Hellman key exchange method). With RSA, we are moving to 2,048-bit key sizes, but with elliptic curve methods, our private key sizes are often just 256 bits long. For example, if you have Bitcoins, your private key which enables your owner of the cryptocurrency is just 256 bits long.
So I am so pleased that Neal I. Koblitz and Victor Miller were recently recognized for their work with the Levchin Prize at the real-world cryptography conference:
Both of them deserve the award as they discovered ECC independently of each other [1] here:
and [2] here:
