Under the Hood: ECC

Under the Hood: ECC

The Magic of Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Last week I was asked “ECC is used in lots of place, and I want to use it. How do I encrypt with it?”, and my answer was “You don’t, as it’s not really used in encryption. It is for signing (ECDSA) and key exchange (ECDH)”.

And so, the wonderful world of ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) is constrained to two of the most important areas of security … how we prove things, and how we generate secret things. The whole encryption thing is kinda tied-up with symmetric key encryption, as methods such as AES and ChaCha20 are fast and efficient, and really know how to scramble things.

So, let’s just get under the hood of ECC and see its magic:

Demos:

• Elliptic Curve points in a finite field: https://asecuritysite.com/encryption/ecc_pointsv
• ECC point for common curves: https://asecuritysite.com/encryption/ecc_points2
• ECDH: https://asecuritysite.com/encryption/ecdh3
• ECDSA: https://asecuritysite.com/encryption/js_ecdsa