ECC Cryptography Hacked

For in-depth coverage of cryptography, you can't beat Bruce Scheier's newsletter. Good to subscribe to and good to read. A recent issue covers the strength of the ECC crypto algorithm that we use on our PDA devices at PatientKeeper.

Elliptic Curve Public-Key Cryptography

In September of this year, nearly 200 people using 740 computers managed to crack a message encrypted with 97-bit elliptic curve cryptography. The process took 16,000 MIPS-years of computing, about twice as much as used by the team that recently cracked a 512-bit RSA encryption key. Certicom, the company who sponsored this challenge, has offered this result as evidence that elliptic curve cryptography is stronger than RSA.