How Mathematics Can Facilitate Secure Communication—Cryptographic Key Exchange
Rainer Steinwandt · NSUWorks (Nova Southeastern University) · 2014
One of the fundamental tasks of cryptography is to enable confidential communication across a public communication network. To this aim, efficient encryption schemes have been identified, offering strong security guarantees once the communication partners have a common secret key available. Establishing such a secret key among two or more parties in the absence of a secure communication infrastructure is not straightforward, however. Thus, cryptographic key exchange offers solutions for this task. This talk discusses cryptographic requirements of key exchange protocols with two or more participants, and shows how suitable mathematical tools—in particular, elliptic curves—can be used to derive practical solutions with good scalability.