Open-source group gets Sun security gift

Open-source group gets Sun security gift
Elliptical Curve Cryptography is cool. The release of these tools to the OpenSSL group is very important for the move toward a more ubiquitous computing environment.

Sun Microsystems has donated new cryptography technology to an open-source project at the heart of many secure transactions on the Internet. Sun's "elliptic curve" technology is involved in the process of using keys to encrypt and decrypt information for electronic transactions. Such encryption lets people buy products online, for example, while shielding their credit card number from prying eyes. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based server seller donated the technology to the OpenSSL project, a programming group that makes an open-source version of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption system.

Elliptic curve cryptography will enable secure communications with devices that don't have as much calculating power as most desktop computers, said Whitfield Diffie, Sun's chief security officer and a pioneer of the Diffie-Hellman "public key" cryptography method used today in SSL and other encryption systems. Diffie spoke Thursday during a news conference at the SunNetwork conference here.

"Small gadgets are the most obvious place to use it," Diffie said, but once the technology is built, it likely will spread farther. "The deployment schedule is on the order of several years to a decade unless something comes along in the interim. I would conjecture that by 2010 or so, this will be widely used."

Current encryption technology is based on mathematics developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, Diffie said. "Elliptic curve cryptography brings it forward into the mathematics of the 19th century," he said.