Re:Elliptic Curves
by tptacek on Saturday June 10, 2017 @01:21PM
(#14528182)
Sure! I think we agree.
The whole field of misuse-resistant cryptography is very new, relative to the field as a whole. We didn't even have a usage model of cryptography that was sound until the later 1990s, when the connection was made between authentication and indistinguishability. It's only in the last few years that we've begun to prioritize constructions that make implementation bugs harder to blunder into.
Which is a long way of saying, that's true, but also still an issue relevant to RSA and DH and DSA.
I think the primary reason we read a lot about elliptic curves today is that the field has, at least to the extent that it's not directly promoting post-quantum algorithms, pretty much coalesced around curves as the best modern way to implement asymmetric cryptography.
The whole field of misuse-resistant cryptography is very new, relative to the field as a whole. We didn't even have a usage model of cryptography that was sound until the later 1990s, when the connection was made between authentication and indistinguishability. It's only in the last few years that we've begun to prioritize constructions that make implementation bugs harder to blunder into.
Which is a long way of saying, that's true, but also still an issue relevant to RSA and DH and DSA.
I think the primary reason we read a lot about elliptic curves today is that the field has, at least to the extent that it's not directly promoting post-quantum algorithms, pretty much coalesced around curves as the best modern way to implement asymmetric cryptography.