There are about billion of websites currently on the internet. And every second this number keeps rising. And search engine giants like Google, Bing are making it easier for everyone to search for any topics.
With that said the security breaches for the sites are also increasing. And to look about the security breaches we don’t have to go very past also. The recent twitter breach is a very live and eye-opening example for all of us.
Therefore the search engines are en
couraging the website owners and web developers to increase the security of the sites.
Now you must be thinking how do I know if my website is secure? For that, you just have to check the certificate installed on your website. If you have installed an SSL certificate on your site your site is secure.
And the search engine will also tell the people your site is secure. But nowadays those secure sites are also getting hacked.
But you will tell me I just say those sites are secure, Yes those are but the hackers are getting pretty creative with hacking the sites.
But now we have a new technique to make our site way more secure than it was before.
Let’s see what that technique.
ECC stands for Elliptic Curve Cryptography.
To understand the technique lets first understand what cryptography is.
Cryptography is a technique in which original data is hidden or converted to some other form to protect it from stealing. In cryptography, we encrypt the data before sending and it gets decrypted after it is received by the receiver.
So here in the Elliptic Curve Cryptography algorithm is used to hide the data and data is encrypted with mathematical function to make it more secure.
It used the Elliptic Curve function to encrypt the data.
Now the question you might be having is if we are not using ECC techniques what techniques we are using right now.
At present most of the sites are using RSA techniques for encryption.
What are RSA techniques?
RSA techniques are named after its creator Rivest, Shamir, Adleman. It is well-known techniques which are also considered by many people as the most secure technique there is.
RSA is a public-key encryption technique. In this technique, there are two keys. The public key and the private key.
In general public key is available to everyone hence the name public but the private is only with the receiver so that receiver can use his private to decrypt the data.
So whenever a data is sent with the RSA algorithm it first gets encrypted by users’ public key which is available to everyone but when the user receives the data it can only be decrypted by its private key which is mostly installed on the user’s device.
Here we have to remember one thing both techniques use the asymmetric encryption which is one key for encryption the data and one key for decrypting the data.
Now here are the reasons for choosing ECC over RSA.
Less key size
The size of the key used in the ECC algorithm is smaller than the key used in the RSA algorithm. 256 bit Elliptic Curve Cryptography key is equal in size to the 3072-bit size of the RSA key. Which hugely affects the size of data transmitted.
Let’s take an example.
Say you send the data through the website which is using the RSA algorithm for their SSL certificate. Then data send to the server with encryption requires more size of the key in terms of bits.
But if the same site is using the ECC algorithm then it will require less bit size for the key.
More security
Mathematically function used in the ECC algorithm is next o impossible to crack by the hacker. So even if data gets grab by the middle man he cannot be able to see what in the data which in turn makes the data impossible to later.
Less size of the certificate
Due to the less key size the size of the SSL certificate having an ECC algorithm reduce greatly in comparison to SL certificate with the RSA algorithm. So when your certificate site is less it can retrieve easily by the server.
Speed of site is an increase
Because of less size of certificate and less size of keys, it will be easier and faster by the server to retrieve the data by server. And when the retrieval speed of the server increases the speed of the site also gets increases.
ECC is less expensive
I know you must be thinking how can Elliptic Curve Cryptography be less expensive than RSA if it has so many features? So let me tell you one thing here less expensive means for RSA we required more resources but ECC can manage with fewer resources also.
Now the most important question how to get ECC on your SSL certificate?
The procedure is simple. It is just like installing the SSL certificate on your site. Many companies provide an SSL certificate with an SSL certificate. And in terms of money, it is not that expensive. It cost as similar as installing the SSL certificate with the RSA algorithm.
You can just upgrade your existing SSL certificate also with the Elliptic Curve Cryptography algorithm.
In conclusion
SSL certificate with the Elliptic Curve Cryptography algorithm is the future of the wesite security. It provides less size of the key in terms of bit, less size of the certificate, and also gives a powerful performance in comparison to SSL certificate with RSA algorithms.
And if you want to ahead of the crowd you must implement this technique on your website to make it more secure and give a better experience to your users.
