Fergie's Tech Blog

NSA Pushing Elliptic-Curve Cryptography

Kathleen Hickey writes on GCN.com:

The cryptographic security standards used in public-key infrastructures, RSA and Diffie-Hellman, were introduced in the 1970s. And although they haven’t been cracked, their time could be running out.

That’s one reason the National Security Agency wants to move to elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) for cybersecurity by 2010, the year the National Institute of Standards and Technology plans to recommend all government agencies move to ECC, said Dickie George, technology director at NSA’s information assurance directorate.

Another reason is that current standards would have to continually extend their key lengths to ensure security, which increases processing time and could make it difficult to secure small devices. ECC can provide greater security with shorter keys, experts say.

The switch to ECC will be neither quick nor painless. It will require mass replacement of hardware and software to be compatible with ECC and new NSA cybersecurity standards.

posted by Fergie @ 8/08/2007 09:41:00 AM