The Beauty and Power of Elliptic Curves: Message Recovery From a Digital Signature
I posted an article on ECRN (Elliptic Curve Nyberg and Rueppel), and how you could recover a message from a digital signature, and someone asked how it worked, so I will document here. The related article is:
and where we can recover a message from a signature (r,s).
Introduction
There’s one simple little equation that protects your online security like no other equation:
y²=x³+ax+b (mod p)
This is the equation of an elliptic curve, and it is beautiful in its simplicity and in its power to protect us when we are online. With this, we define a base point on the curve as G, and then define a scalar value of x. We then multiply G by x, and determine a point:
P=x.G
This is the scalar multiplication of points, and, along with point addition, is the basic operation that we conduct when processing with elliptic curves.
