The World Has Fallen Head over Heels for Elliptic Curve Cryptography

One of the great advancements in human kind?

Elliptic Curve cryptography (ECC) is on the top of the world just now, whether it is in signing transactions (ECDSA), or proving identity, or in generating a shared secret (Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman — ECDH). It is the true king of the hill, and can do little wrong. While it’s public key peers —especially RSA — just seem so cumbersome, it trumps all with its sheer simplicity, and its beauty of operation is something to behold. Out of the box it does everything that we need in creating a truly trusted world.

When you connect to your corporate wi-fi network, you are likely to be using ECDH to generate your session key. ECDH is the method of choice too in the new WPA-3 standard and which finally gets rid of the horrible four-way handshake in WPA-2 for home wi-fi networks.

In Blockchain, too, we create the keys for our wallet by generating a random 256-bit value, and then derive the elliptic curve public key from this, and which is used to create our public address. It is sheer beauty in action.

In TLS 1.2, the horrible passing of a shared key with the RSA public key of the server (and which can lead to a long-term hack of all the keys used) has been dumped in TLS 1.3, and…