Tag: cryptography

After creating a robust solution for mail sending, filtering, delivering and storing, one starts wondering how to add more confidentiality and integrity to such communication setup security mix. DKIM signatures and SPF records are mostly helpful for fighting spam, but for an targeted attack they pose little to no threat. And as targeted attacks are always really big threat, this does not make the situation look very optimistic for the email user. Nowadays, there are at least two major standards used for securing email communication. Both have their advantages and both have their disadvantages - so let's have a closer look at both of them. And as you can probably guess, we are getting closer to our goal of securing email communication using at least one of these standards.

After slightly going astray from the elliptically curved path on our favorite doughnuts, we return from the realm of electronic mail to much more interesting world of mathematics. Today, our effort to explain elliptic curves in simple Weierstrass form and their usage should reach its second culmination. With Diffie-Hellman key exchange explained, the only part that is missing is some digital signature scheme. So please read on to find the beauty of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm beast.

We have already learned about elliptic curves in simple Weierstrass form over a finite field and the group structure the points of such curve form that we can use all this information to look at some cryptography built on top of this. Going from the point negation, doubling and addition over scalar multiplication and prime order curves with no problematic points to the discrete logarithm problem and back, we show how to perform a secure key exchange using our favourite doughnuts.

Algebraic groups built on top of points of elliptic curves together with the scalar multiplication specified as repeated addition can be used as basic building blocks for asymmetric cryptography systems. The strength of these systems if derived from the toughness of the reversing the scalar multiplication operation. It is very expensive to reverse this operation and to answer a question like "how many times we have to multiply point G to get given point P". This problem is called Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem - or ECDLP for short. In this article we show the toughness of this problem.

Last time we have shown how to perform scalar multiplication of point on elliptic curve in simple Weierstrass form over a finite field. We have also shown that all the required properties hold for all rational points of the curve - which is a good thing. The problem we have not tackled yet is the complexity of the scalar multiplication operation. Today we are about to present a method of performing fast scalar multiplication in which the complexity of the operation grows much slower than the size of the scalar.