Code and Cipher, published quarterly by Certicom Corp., is an educational newsletter that covers the security and cryptography industry. In each issue we will examine security issues and cryptography trends in an objective manner. We welcome your thoughts, opinions and comments on anything that affects the industry. Please send your feedback on this issue and what you’d like to see in upcoming ones to: codeandcipher@certicom.com.
Key establishment has been deemed so fundamental to security that ANSI and NIST are both producing standards and recommendations to guide the implementation. This article breaks down the elements involved in key establishment and outlines the desirable attributes to help you decide which scheme to use and when.
When a number of people use the same system to exchange information, the distribution effort for shared keying grows quadratically. This article uses illustrated examples to compare the performance of two schemes for key agreement: Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) and Elliptic Curve Menezes-Qu-Vanstone (ECMQV).
In this column, Scott looks at different key establishment schemes and discusses how MQV addresses the weaknesses found in Diffie-Hellman key agreement.
This issue of Code and Cipher focusses on the subject of key establishment in current security standards and highlights the importance of this often overlooked but central area of concern.