A (relatively easy to understand) primer on elliptic curve cryptograph

Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is one of the most powerful but least understood types of cryptography in wide use today. An increasing number of websites make extensive use of ECC to secure everything from customers' HTTPS connections to how they pass data between data centers. Fundamentally, it's important for end users to understand the technology behind any security system in order to trust it. To that end, we looked around to find a good, relatively easy-to-understand primer on ECC in order to share with our users. Finding none, we decided to write one ourselves. That is what follows.

 

Be warned: this is a complicated subject, and it's not possible to boil it down to a pithy blog post. In other words, settle in for a bit of an epic because there's a lot to cover. If you just want the gist, here's the TL;DR version: ECC is the next generation of public key cryptography, and based on currently understood mathematics, it provides a significantly more secure foundation than first-generation public key cryptography systems like RSA. If you're worried about ensuring the highest level of security while maintaining performance, ECC makes sense to adopt. If you're interested in the details, read on.