Tor switch to elliptic curve how to#
Tor switch to elliptic curve full#

Tor switch to elliptic curve full#

We won’t assume any familiarity with these topics ahead of time, but we do intend to develop some maturity through the post without giving full courses on the side-topics. Shamir-Massey-Omura encryption and Digital SignaturesĪlong the way we’ll survey a host of mathematical topics as needed, including group theory, projective geometry, and the theory of cryptographic security.Finite fields primer (just mathematics).Points on elliptic curves as Python objects.The algebraic structure of elliptic curves.Elliptic curves as elementary equations.The series will have the following parts:

Tor switch to elliptic curve how to#

If you want motivation for elliptic curves, or if you want to understand how to implement your own ECC, or you want to understand the nuts and bolts of an existing implementation, or you want to know some of the major open problems in the theory of elliptic curves, this series is for you. So in this series of posts we’re going to get knee deep in a mess of elliptic curves and write a full implementation. I’ve seen some elliptic curve primers floating around with all the recent talk of cryptography, but very few of them seem to give an adequate technical description, and legible implementations designed to explain ECC algorithms aren’t easy to find (I haven’t found any). If nothing else, understanding elliptic curves allows one to understand the existing backdoor. Considering the known backdoors placed by the NSA into certain ECC standards, elliptic curve cryptography is a hot contemporary issue. Many experts have been calling for the security industry to switch to Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), because, as we’ll see, the problem appears to be more complex and hence achieves higher security with smaller keys. Why? It turns out that people are getting just good enough at factoring integers that secure key sizes are getting too big to be efficient. įor example, the crypto community is quickly moving away from the RSA standard ( which we covered in this blog post). What we really need is more understanding of cryptography, and implementing the algorithms yourself is the best way to do that. Of course there are massive pitfalls and very few people actually need home-brewed cryptography, but history has made it clear that blindly accepting the word of the experts is not an acceptable course of action. With all the recent revelations of government spying and backdoors into cryptographic standards, I am starting to disagree with the argument that you should never roll your own cryptography.