[Cryptography] Why is ECC secure?

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 1:06 PM, Rick Smith, Cryptosmith <me at cys.me> wrote:

> I want to thank Bill Cox for taking the time to ask his question, and
> especially thank those of you who took the time to point at detailed
> failures in his suggestion. I’m largely self-taught in the higher math
> related to this, and these colloquial discussions make it easier for me to
> understand the textbook descriptions.
>

I think that once you get above a certain level in math, everyone is
essentially self taught.

What makes subjects difficult to learn is often the set of assumptions that
people writing books make about what people already know. One of the
reasons the Feynman lectures on physics are so good is that he does not
make a lot of assumptions about what the students know.

That is why I start teaching public key cryptography with digital
signatures rather than encryption. The need for two keys in signatures is
much more obvious than with encryption. Instead of teaching about an X they
already know and then about a better X working on a very different
principle, teach a Y.

One of the things that makes the prior art searches I do quite challenging
and a work in the history of computer science is that assumptions about
what people knew have changed greatly over time.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20150606/931ea48c/attachment.html>