The Answer to Life, The Universe, and Cybersecurity …

Oh, I miss Douglas Adam’s writing. I hung on every word of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Gallery and just loved the original BBC programme [here]. I even loved the movie [here], with its Hollywood feel! To me, only two other writers have ever come close to Douglas for exciting my interest in technology and science (and the cross-over into science-fiction)… Martin Gardner and Isaac Asimov.

For Douglas, the answer to life, the universe and everything was … 42. But, what’s the answer to life, the universe and cybersecurity? Well, it has probably got to be a prime number, as these are at the core of much of our security foundations. It is a prime number that secures our browser tunnels, it is a prime number that helps prove the identity of a Web server that you connect to, it is prime numbers that help prove our online identity, and it is a prime number that helps sign our cryptocurrency transactions.

And, so which prime number? Well, Satoshi Nakimota liked the secp256k1 curve, and which uses a prime number of [here]:

2²⁵⁶−2³²−2⁹−2⁸−2⁷−2⁶−2⁴−1

but, saying that out-loud is a bit of a monthful. Anyway, the method that it uses for creating digital signatures (ECDSA) does not quite scale into a distributed web. So what about the NIST-defined P-256 curve? Well, it has: