The SSL\/TLS certificate that uses elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) in place of the RSA algorithm to encrypt the data transferred between the user and the website is called the ECC SSL certificate. The ECC SSL certificates are much more secure than the widely used RSA SSL certificates.<\/p>\n
For a while now the RSA public key cryptosystem has been the standard in the SSL\/TLS industry. But RSA\u2019s days are numbered. Everyone should be moving towards Elliptic Curve Cryptography for SSL\/TLS and most other PKI functions, too.<\/p>\n
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That\u2019s because ECC offers myriad benefits.<\/p>\n
Granted, not all CAs offered ECC-capable SSL\/TLS certificates and there are still a handful of popular servers and platforms that have yet to add support. But the industry is moving away from RSA and ECC will soon become the new standard.<\/p>\n
Elliptic Curve Cryptography is based on mapping points on an elliptic curve. It sounds complex, but it\u2019s really not once you see it in action. Several points on a given elliptic curve are chosen and plotted, each time reflecting the third point across the X access, and it continues until sufficient entropy has been achieved.<\/p>\n
Because of the nature of the cryptography, ECC has a distinct advantage over its RSA counterpart: it\u2019s not as vulnerable to quantum computing. Owing to the massive processing power of quantum computers \u2013 which will be viable in the next decade \u2013 the method behind RSA, prime factorization, will be rendered fairly ineffective early on. ECC will not be invulnerable to quantum computing, but it will have more hardness and there elliptic curve-based post-quantum cryptosystems in development as we speak.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a reason that many enterprises decide to load balance and shift SSL\/TLS functions to an edge device to free up resources on their application servers: RSA is expensive. The keys are massive, almost unwieldy. The current standard is 2048-bit, though some go has high as 4096. That taxes a server. Especially at scale where you\u2019re performing thousands of handshakes at a time and then encrypting and decrypting data from each connection.<\/p>\n
ECC doesn\u2019t have this problem, its keys are substantially smaller. That, in turn, is less taxing on servers. An equivalent ECC key to the standard 2048-bit RSA one would be 224-bit. A little more than 1\/10th the size of its RSA counterpart. That means less overhead during handshakes, which means a faster website and a better user experience.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve already discussed how resource-hungry RSA is as a cryptosystem, well that\u2019s not going to get any better as encryption standards become more stringent and more hardness is demanded from private keys. And a big part of the problem is that as RSA key sizes increase, the improvement in security is not commensurate to the growth of the key. A 4096-bit key doesn\u2019t provide double the security of a 2048-bit one. As keys grow increasingly larger, the gains made in security continue to decline. And the server will continue to be taxed more and more.<\/p>\n
Get DigiCert SSL\/TLS Certificates from a globally trusted CheapSSLsecurity.com. DigiCert offers unlimited server licesenses, unlimited reissuances, 256-bit encryption, dynamic trust seal, and more.<\/p>\n
| ECC SSL Certificates<\/th>\n | Years<\/th>\n | Price\/Year<\/th>\n | <\/th>\n<\/tr>\n |
|---|---|---|---|
| DigiCert Secure Site Pro EV SSL<\/strong><\/a><\/td>\n |