Elliptic Curve Security

My goodness, its been 10 years since Dr. Dobb's published its Elliptic Curves and Cryptography, by Aleksandar Jurisic and Alfred J. Menezes. That ground-breaking articles was followed a couple of years later by "Elliptic-Curve Cryptography", in which Andrew D. Fernandes compared elliptic curve with other types of cryptography.

Suggesting that elliptic curves are more than an academic past time, it turns out that Nintendo Wii game console game-saved files are signed and encrypted with NIST B 233 bit elliptic curve cryptography, at least according to a posting on the Nintendo-Scene forum. Saved-game files store information about a player's progress video games, so that players can later continue with no loss of data where.

Okay, being more of a PlayStation kind of guy, I admit that I don't know a lot about the Wii, other than playing with it at the store. But it does make you wonder why Nintendo would opt for such a sophisticated security measure. There's every possibility that Wii users are now more secure playing games than, say, making online purchases with credit card.

Still it is cool that technology discussed in Dr. Dobb's a decade ago is finding its way into the mainstream today.

-- Jonathan Erickson

Posted by Jon Erickson at 10:22 AM  Permalink