Test-of-Time: Curve 25519 and PAKE
When you publish a paper, you never know the impact it will have. Some papers you think are amazing, but end up getting very few citiation. Others can suprise you by getting picked-up by other researchers, and who build on your work.
This week, the IACR (International Association for Cryptologic Research) PKC (Public Key Cryptography) conference announced two Test-of-Time Awards — one for PAKE and the other for Curve 25519 [here]. This award relates to papers published at PKC over the past 15 years and which have made a significant contribution.
Curve 25519
The Curve 25519 paper was written by the mighty Daniel J Bernstein (djb) [here]:
You can tell the paper was published 15 years ago, as the tests focus on the Intel Pentium process. But Curve 25519 has stood the test of time, and is now used in many applications areas including with the Tor network, with its usage in the EdDSA signature method (Ed25519) and in X22215 for key exchange. The equation used for the curve is:
y²=x³+486662 x²+x (mod p)
and where p=2²⁵⁵−19
