Tag: cryptography

As I have had to give a talk about elliptic curve cryptography for the testing community in Czech Republic at the regular pro[test] event held in Prague two weeks ago, I wondered what could be actually tested about ECC in real-world scenarios. As I was digging through my notes, I realized there is something everybody really hates - waiting for web page to load. And with HTTPs everywhere now the crucial part slowing the whole browsing experience down is how fast the connection can be established. That is because encrypted connection requires exchanging quite a lot of information at the beginning and can go on without much overhead afterwards.

Picture yourself in an Abelian group on a two-dimensional finite field with identity point at the infinity and group generator...

Sometimes technology resembles psychedelic pictures of the 60's - in a good way. Elliptic curve cryptography primitives are an example of such technology. When - as a programmer - you dive into them, you find yourself in a spectacularly simple yet effective machine. I am still talking about the ECC! While working on a project which uses ECC primitives I started wondering: why only a handful of protocols use these? Why is such beautiful tool as ECDSA left alone in the corner and everyone dances with bigger and bigger hammers like RSA?

I have had a tremendous opportunity to be a speaker at the SecPublica 2016 security conference held in Prague on 31st March. All the speakers - including myself - gave the talks in Czech and therefore the presentation slides and videos are useful only for you guys from the Czech (and Slovak) Republic.

Feel free to check them out for yourself at http://www.secpublica.cz/2016/. There are however a few things worth noting from my preparations for this talk I would like to write here about.