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Venturing closer to our goal of using elliptic curves for digital signatures and encryption, we describe the simplest point operation on elliptic curve in Weierstrass form. This operation is called negation and it somehow resembles the negation of numbers you learned about in elementary school. We have (sort of) finalized the software stack for visualizing elliptic curves both in 2D or 3D so I would like to hear some feedback if the pictures - and especially the video - are clear and easy to understand. And now for something completely negating...

After a quick introduction to simple elliptic curves used in cryptography and finally for securing our online communication, we cannot move forward without solving one major problem. How to represent these curves, and all of their points thereof, in computer memory. Why this is a major problem? There is an infinite number of real numbers, but computers can store only a finitely-sized things - including numbers. I'd like to explain how we can overcome this inherent trouble and show you that anyone can understand these modern cryptographic fundamentals.

We are about to start a journey to the realm of elliptic curve cryptography. It may seem strange at this point as why we should bother with that, but rest assured that we will eventually find out how to use this knowledge to secure our email communication. In this introduction, you can expect to see what an elliptic curve looks like, how it is defined and how it can be simplified if we want to make some practical use of it.

After venturing into the basic architecture of a robust email solution last week, we will look into the remaining missing bits today. Then we should look for some answers about how to secure the email communication end-to-end. In this article we find anti-spam and anti-virus solution integrated into our infrastructure, configure server-side filters, add DKIM[1] signing and verification and give our users nice webmail interface to use.

As we have shown two weeks ago, email can be a very convenient tool for decent communication and in the future we will show that it can also be very secure tool if you need to send confidential information and verify its source using digital signature. But before we venture into that quadrant of space-time, we need to have a solid infrastructure in place. We start building such infrastructure with creating email server that can host virtual domains with multiple mailboxes and aliases. We will also ensure the mailboxes are accessible using common protocols and it is possible to easily administer the whole solution.