The Most Significant Future Risk Around Blockchain: ECDSA … and Meet IOTA

The security world has fallen head over heals for Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) methods, and ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm) is becoming the standard in creating keys and to sign for transactions. For exchange key it is ECDH (Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman) that often creates our secure connections.

But quantum computers have both ECC and RSA is their sights. But what’s at risk? Well a core risk is around keys used in ECDSA and the signatures added to the blockchain, including within Ethereum and Bitcoin. With this they use the ECDSA method to create the keys for the wallet and to sign for transactions.

With ECDSA, we create a random 256-bit private key, and then can easily derive our public key. It is then extremely difficult to find the random value which generated the given public key:

The private key is used to sign for transactions, and the public key proves that a given private key has been used. But with Shor’s algorithm we are able to reverse back the private key for any public address, and thus take over control of a person’s wallet.