4 ms·

I've seen a lot of talk about ECC on hacker news in the last few weeks and people seem really interested. My question is why? Are you guys about to roll out ECC

by theboss 13y ago

I've seen a lot of talk about ECC on hacker news in the last few weeks and people seem really interested. My question is why? Are you guys about to roll out ECC as your crypto-solution? Nobody really encrypts large amounts of data RSA/ECC, so the benefits of ECC aren't even THAT big since at best, these are used for a key agreement. Aren't I better just using RSA/DH for my key agreement, algorithms that are safe that I fully understand, than ECC?

ctz 13y ago
The main benefit of EC over IF/DL based cryptosystems is that it scales much better as you move to higher security levels. Compare, for instance, the speed of RSA with a 15360-bit modulus and the speed of ECC over NIST-P521. These are thought to provide roughly the same security level.
- theboss 13y ago
  Yeah but who is doing that here? For the most part, a lot of people here just need an HTTPS cert with RSA 2048. I guess I may be wrong and it might help with efficiency if you have 10,000 connections HTTPS request per second and you're working at a big company, but if you're just a tiny website with a TLS cert then I wouldn't waste my time learning about ECC if I were you.
maaku 13y ago
Probably a lot of it is bitcoin related (which uses ECDSA over the secp256k1 curve).
espeed 13y ago
Use elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman with forward secrecy. See... Google Security: Protecting data for the long term with forward secrecy http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2011/11/protecting-data-for-long-term-with.html http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2011/11/protecting-... Google Research: Fast Elliptic Curve Cryptography in OpenSSL http://research.google.com/pubs/pub37376.html http://research.google.com/pubs/pub37376.html http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/37376.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust... SSL Labs: Deploying Forward Secrecy https://community.qualys.com/blogs/securitylabs/2013/06/25/ssl-labs-deploying-forward-secrecy https://community.qualys.com/blogs/securitylabs/2013/06/25/s... Michael Horowitz: Perfect Forward Secrecy can block the NSA from secure web pages, but no one uses it (http://blogs.computerworld.com/encryption/22366/can-nsa-see-through-encrypted-web-pages-maybe-so http://blogs.computerworld.com/encryption/22366/can-nsa-see-...)

by theboss 13y ago

ctz 13y ago

The main benefit of EC over IF/DL based cryptosystems is that it scales much better as you move to higher security levels. Compare, for instance, the speed of RSA with a 15360-bit modulus and the speed of ECC over NIST-P521. These are thought to provide roughly the same security level.

theboss 13y ago
Yeah but who is doing that here? For the most part, a lot of people here just need an HTTPS cert with RSA 2048. I guess I may be wrong and it might help with efficiency if you have 10,000 connections HTTPS request per second and you're working at a big company, but if you're just a tiny website with a TLS cert then I wouldn't waste my time learning about ECC if I were you.

maaku 13y ago

Probably a lot of it is bitcoin related (which uses ECDSA over the secp256k1 curve).

espeed 13y ago

Use elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman with forward secrecy. See... Google Security: Protecting data for the long term with forward secrecy http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2011/11/protecting-data-for-long-term-with.html http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2011/11/protecting-... Google Research: Fast Elliptic Curve Cryptography in OpenSSL http://research.google.com/pubs/pub37376.html http://research.google.com/pubs/pub37376.html http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/37376.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust... SSL Labs: Deploying Forward Secrecy https://community.qualys.com/blogs/securitylabs/2013/06/25/ssl-labs-deploying-forward-secrecy https://community.qualys.com/blogs/securitylabs/2013/06/25/s... Michael Horowitz: Perfect Forward Secrecy can block the NSA from secure web pages, but no one uses it (http://blogs.computerworld.com/encryption/22366/can-nsa-see-through-encrypted-web-pages-maybe-so http://blogs.computerworld.com/encryption/22366/can-nsa-see-...)