Foundations of Blockchain

Elliptic-curve cryptography

ECC is a public-private cryptography based on the elliptic curve mentioned earlier. It performs the addition of points on the elliptic curve to compute public-private key pairs. ECC requires smaller key sizes than other asymmetric key cryptosystems, such as RSA. ECC is widely used in key exchange mechanisms and digital signatures and is rarely used in encryption systems.

ECC provides the same level of security as RSA, but has a smaller key size. A 256-bit ECC key is equivalent to a 3,072-bit RSA key. Similarly, a 384-bit ECC key provides the same level of security as a 7,680-bit RSA key, and so on. We can clearly see the advantage of less computation time due to the smaller key size in ECC.

Due to its key size ...