Is there a reason why people still use RSA instead of ECC?
The security of these hardware devices is not tied to the RSA algorithm per se. The devices might not be more resilient against these attacks simply by using ECC instead of RSA.
Either way: don't implement RSA or ECC yourself. Use something like PGP/GPG.
I'm not even sure what the encryption technology is called, but it would be very cool to play with.
Schneier on the attack: http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securityma...
When you do require a "magic constant" in a cryptographic algorithm, it is common to show good faith by deriving it in a way that would make it difficult to embed a backdoor. For instance ascii text, digits of pi, or the lowest AES encrypted number that fulfils certain criteria.
Edit: these is also called "nothing up my sleeve numbers".
When you do require a "magic constant" in a cryptographic algorithm, it is common to show good faith by deriving it in a way that would make it difficult to embed a backdoor. For instance ascii text, digits of pi, or the lowest AES encrypted number that fulfils certain criteria.
The initialization constant in SipHash is awesome: "somepseudorandomlychosenbytes".
Given the horrible performance of that PRNG, I wonder if anyone implements it, securely I would hope (with random point generation rather than using the "recommended" possibly insecure points).
Patents used to be the reason ECC was rarely used (that and novelty), but there are ECC systems in somewhat wide use that aren't patent-licensed.