10-04-2017, 09:05 PM
Cryptography
Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is one of the most powerful but least understood forms of cryptography in widespread use today. The CloudFlare, we widely use ECC to ensure all of our clients ' HTTPS connections on how we transfer data between our data centers.
In fact, we believe that it is important to be able to understand the technology behind any security system in order to trust him. To this end, we looked around to find a good, relatively easy to understand tutorial on ECC to share with our users. Not finding, we decided to write one myself. That is the future.
Be careful: this is a difficult subject, and it is not possible, is informative blog. In other words, to live in a small number of epics, because there is a lot to cover. If you just want the gist, TL; DR is: ECC is the next generation of public key cryptography and, based on current understanding of mathematics, provides a much more solid basis than the first generation of the public key cryptography systems like RSA. If you're worried about providing the highest level of security while maintaining productivity, the ECC has the sense to take. If you are interested in the details, read on.
The dawn of public-key cryptography
History of cryptography can be divided into two epochs: classical era and modern era. The turning point between the two occurred in 1977, when introduced as RSA and Diffie-Hellman key exchange. These new algorithms were revolutionary because they were the first viable cryptographic schemes, where security was based on the theory of numbers; It was the first to make a secure connection between two parties without the shared secret. Cryptography has gone from about safely transporting secret code books from around the world to be able to have a provably secure communication between any two parties without worrying about someone listening in on the key exchange.
Modern Cryptography is based on the idea that the key used to encrypt data can be made public while the key used to decrypt your data may be private. As such, these systems are known as key cryptographic systems for general use. The first, and still the most widely used of these systems are known as RSA-named for the initials of three men who first publicly described algorithm: Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman.
What is needed for the public to the work of the cryptographic system is a set of algorithms that are easy to handle in one direction but difficult to reverse. In the case of the RSA algorithm is easy to multiply two prime numbers. If the multiplication is easy algorithm, it is difficult to algorithm a couple of decomposition product of multiplying by two of its constituent prime numbers. Algorithms that have this feature-easily in one direction, it is difficult, on the other hand, are known as Luke functions. Find a good hatch Function is crucial for establishing a secure public-key encryption system. Simplified: the greater the difference between difficulty going one direction into the hatch and going to another, more secure cryptographic system based on it.