21–30 of 31 posts
Not relevant to ECC, but if anyone here has spare time and any interest at all in crypto, please contribute to the linked site ( http://crypto.stackexchange.com )! In case anyone doesn't know, StackExchange is a network of Q&A websites, of which StackOverflow was the first. Sites go through a proposal process and, if enough people commit, a private and then public beta. The Cryptography StackExchange site is currentl…
[deleted]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need to replace your entire anything, and it's not "just for fun". No, the question is really "EC has these benefits (lower CPU and memory usage) - why aren't these benefits attractive enough for someone to start experimenting with it?" - with those someones probably being companies like Google, Facebook, Dropbox etc that have very substantial amounts of SSL traffic and could surely benefit from saving on m…
"could surely benefit from saving on memory and CPU." ... at a certain labor cost. And memory and CPU prices are forever decreasing and labor cost is sorta increasing. So if it doesn't make sense as a system to do it today it probably never will, for an established organization anyway. Also its not "why aren't they experimenting" but "why aren't they publicly experimenting". And it would nearly be a first in the secu…
Huh? The reason you use SSL for Google and Facebook is so 15 random strangers don't get access to your accounts just because you go online for five minutes in Starbucks.
PRISM is awful and all but that doesn't mean non-state adversaries stopped being a thing overnight.
In 2013, the scales have tipped. RSA is now the less conservative choice. Classical number-theoretic asymmetric cryptography has been getting weaker and weaker with improvements both on factoring and the DLP. ECC has been deployed in more and more systems without patent debacles. Research has firmed up our confidence in ECC.
You should generally be distrustful of any new system that uses asymmetric crypto of any sort. Asymmetric crypto is very difficult to get right; it has more corner cases than AES/SHA constructions do. But you should be especially distrustful if you see a new system that uses RSA.
The top answer tries to brush off the difference in hardness assumptions as "semi-valid", and I think that's rather odd. Assumptions about hardness are pretty damned important in cryptography, and 25 years is not really all that long for mathematicians to have been thinking about a problem.
As another answer points out, the mathematics of the discrete logarithm on elliptic curves is closely related to factoring, and most factoring algorithms have close analogs for the discrete logarithm, so the difference is actually not that great. However it does have a subtle consequence. We've developed some very good sieve based algorithms for factoring in recent decades that do not have obvious analogs for ellipti…
Not relevant to ECC, but if anyone here has spare time and any interest at all in crypto, please contribute to the linked site ( http://crypto.stackexchange.com )! In case anyone doesn't know, StackExchange is a network of Q&A websites, of which StackOverflow was the first. Sites go through a proposal process and, if enough people commit, a private and then public beta. The Cryptography StackExchange site is currentl…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5853601
Feel free to email - probably better than cluttering up the threads here.
Not relevant to ECC, but if anyone here has spare time and any interest at all in crypto, please contribute to the linked site ( http://crypto.stackexchange.com )! In case anyone doesn't know, StackExchange is a network of Q&A websites, of which StackOverflow was the first. Sites go through a proposal process and, if enough people commit, a private and then public beta. The Cryptography StackExchange site is currentl…
GPG and SSH can do ECC for a long time now - where's the trustworthy hardware to help them?
Anyone know of something that can run e.g. on the YubiKey NEO?
I've often heard the claim that elliptic curve cryptography is not used much in practice compared to RSA. I don't doubt its true but I would like to have some evidence for it so I can also say it without being a parrot. I don't know anything about real world implementations of cryptography. How can I go about getting data that RSA is more widely used?
Well, probably the most widely used cryptography is SSL, specifically the kind used in HTTPS. The whole HTTPS ecosystem revolves around certificates authorities that sign your RSA key. So on that fact alone, I would say there's more RSA out there than ECC. SSH is also very widely used and it has traditionally used RSA keys, though it supports DSA keys, too and, more recently, ECDSA (the "EC" being elliptic curve). Sa…
There are relatively many widely deployed systems that use ECC because of resource constrains (short signatures, mainly). For example both Microsoft's product keys and FlexLM use something that is at least described in marketing materials as ECDSA.