What’s At The Core of Cybersecurity on the Internet? Well, it probably includes ECDH

The Internet was created with very little concept of security. Basically, we just need to get data from one place to another in a reliable way. The foundation protocols we created, such as IP, TCP, HTTP and FTP had no real integration of security. Luckily Whitfield Diffie and Marty Hellman came along and showed us it was possible for Bob and Alice to openly communicate, and for them to share a secret key. This key could then be used with symmetric key encryption, and thus secure their communications. It’s almost like Newton’s Law of Physics, applied in cybersecurity, and is known as the Diffie-Helman (DH) method. Its concept is based on discrete logs.

With DH, Bob and Alice generate their private keys (b and a), and then compute their public keys (B and A). These are exchanged, and then we can compute a shared secret, and from this, we can generate a shared key using HKDF (HMAC Key Derivation Function):

But, discrete logs have become a little cumbersome as computing power has improved. These improvements have meant it has become easier to crack the discrete log method for relatively small prime numbers, and…