Neal Koblitz: He Built A Solid Foundation for Cybersecurity and Trust

In a world of the FAANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Apple Netflix, and Google), and where billions of dollars are invested in research and…
Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtrv_FGkxmw

Neal Koblitz: He Built A Solid Foundation for Cybersecurity and Trust

In a world of the FAANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Apple Netflix, and Google), and where billions of dollars are invested in research and development, it is nice to chat with someone who has dedicated themselves to research and teaching. For this, I had the amazing privilege to chat with the co-inventor of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC): Neal Koblitz. For me, it is a bit like a physicist talking with Albert Einstein, or a mathematician talking with Carl Friedrich Gauss.

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)

If you don’t know much about ECC, then you should, as it is a fundamental part of the security of the Internet. Without it, your communications could be spied upon, and where it is often used to verify someone's identity. In fact, the connection you are using to this page is likely to be secured with ECDH (Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman), and Bitcoin would have never really existed without the power of the ECDSA signature method. Also, if you have a YubiKey for your authentication, there’s a good chance it does its digital signing with ECDSA. Basically, elliptic curves are everywhere in digital security. If you want to know a bit more about them, try here:

Neal I. Koblitz

Neal I. Koblitz is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington. He is a co-inventor of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). His original paper was published in 1987 and entitled “Elliptic curve cryptosystems” [1]:

Overall, ECC is one of the greatest breakthroughs in cryptography and which has largely replaced discrete logarithm methods in key exchange and has replaced the RSA method in many applications for digital signing. In fact, ECDSA is the standard signature used for Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Neal was recently recognized for his work with the Levchin Prize at the real-world cryptography conference. His recent work has included applications for lattice cryptography and random oracles. Neal is also the author of several leading textbooks:

  • Koblitz, N. (1994). A course in number theory and cryptography (Vol. 114). Springer Science & Business Media.
  • Koblitz, N. I. (2012). Introduction to elliptic curves and modular forms (Vol. 97). Springer Science & Business Media.

And, so, here’s Neal:

Reference

[1] Koblitz, N. (1987). Elliptic curve cryptosystems. Mathematics of computation, 48(177), 203–209. Link.