Cryptography
ECDSA
Definition
The elliptic-curve variant of the Digital Signature Algorithm, standardized in FIPS 186, producing compact signatures whose security relies on the elliptic-curve discrete logarithm problem.
Examples
- TLS server certificates increasingly use ECDSA-P256 instead of RSA.
- Bitcoin transactions are authorized by ECDSA signatures over secp256k1.
Related terms
Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)
A family of public-key algorithms based on the algebraic structure of elliptic curves over finite fields, offering equivalent security to RSA with much smaller keys.
Digital Signature
A public-key cryptographic mechanism that proves the authenticity, integrity and non-repudiation of a message or document.
Public-Key Cryptography
A branch of cryptography that uses paired public and private keys to enable encryption, key exchange, digital signatures, and authentication without a pre-shared secret.
ECDH
The elliptic-curve variant of the Diffie–Hellman key-exchange protocol, providing the same shared-secret functionality with smaller keys and faster operations.
RSA Algorithm
A public-key algorithm by Rivest, Shamir and Adleman (1977) whose security rests on the difficulty of factoring the product of two large prime numbers.
Cryptographic Hash Function
A deterministic one-way function that maps arbitrary-length input to a fixed-length digest, designed to be collision-, preimage-, and second-preimage-resistant.