ECC beauty and legacy beast
Written by Dominik Joe Pantůček on 2016-04-14
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?