2005 May 04
Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) Security protocols, developed in part by UW professors Scott Vanstone and Alfred Menezes will soon become the standard used to protect U.S. government communications. The National Security Agency (NSA) recently recommended a set of advanced cryptography algorithms known as Suite B for securing sensitive and unclassified data. The development and commercialization of ECC was pioneered by the Canadian company Certicom, which was co-founded by Prof. Scott Vanstone, of UW's Department of Combinatorics and Optimization. Suite B includes the public key protocols Elliptic Curve Menezes-Qu-Vanstone (ECMQV) and Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) for key agreement and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) for authentication.
Professor Vanstone said, "The NSA strategy is major news for the security industry and all government agencies or suppliers because it sets the security standards for at least the next few decades. The NSA has stated that there are more than 1.3 million cryptographic devices in the U.S. inventory, over 75 percent of which will be replaced during the next decade under the U.S. Crypto Modernization Program. A system is only as strong as its weakest link. By using the same high level of protection for all communications, especially security that is standards-based and interoperable, agencies and all organizations can establish a trusted system that is much harder to compromise."
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
Tel: 519-888-4567 x33293
Fax: 519-885-1208
Contact | Feedback: newseditor@cs.uwaterloo.ca | David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science | Faculty of Mathematics
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