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Elliptic Curve Cryptography Basics | Cryptography & Blockchain
Simple Explanation of ECC — Elliptic Curve Cryptography | Blockchain | Karthikeyan Nagaraj
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6 min readJan 23, 2023
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Introduction:
- A popular implementation of the public key, and the private key is the Rivest Shamir Adleman (RSA) algorithm.
- The common application of RSA is passwordless user authentication, for example for accessing a virtual machine on Amazon cloud.
- Though RSA is very commonly used in many applications, blockchains need a more efficient and stronger algorithm.
- Efficiency is a critical requirement since the public key pair is frequently used in many different operations in blockchain protocol.
Elliptic Curve Cryptography, the ECC family of algorithms is used in the bitcoin as well as an Ethereum blockchain for generating the key pair.
Why ECC, not RSA?
- ECC is stronger than RSA for a given number of bits.
- 256-bit ECC key pair is equal in strength to about 3072 bits of RSA key pair.
- Both bitcoin and Ethereum use ECC-based algorithms for their encryption needs