12 ELLIPTIC CURVES
The introduction of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) in 1985 revolutionized public-key cryptography. It’s more powerful and efficient than alternatives like RSA and classical Diffie–Hellman: ECC with a 256-bit key is stronger than RSA with a 4,096-bit key. But it’s also more complex.
Like RSA, ECC consists mainly of multiplications of large numbers, but it does so to combine points on a mathematical curve, called an elliptic curve (this has nothing to do with an ellipse, by the way). To complicate matters, there are many types of elliptic curves—simple and sophisticated, efficient and inefficient, and secure and insecure, ...
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