Tl;dr - Choosing parameters for ECC is very important but also very difficult. Also, ECC is more resistant to quantum algorithms than RSA.

I didn’t know about the PQC readiness of ECC so thank you!

To my understanding, picking the right ECC parameters is critical to ensuring large enough entropy that it can’t be brute forced. There are a lot of weak and easy to compromise parameters, and a lot of trust has to be put in the standards organizations declaring which ones are “safe” like the NIST curves. Or you can choose your own, with a lot of risk associated.

There’s also the fact that I believe there’s more potential to leak info/expose side channels on the embedded devices running these protocols (I’ve personally had to worry at work!)

interesting about the security, it looks like ECC is arguably more secure against quantum algorithms? I first learned about all of this stuff about 10 years ago, and I only vaguely remember reading about the pqc resistance. Thanks for the update on that!

Edit: But I want to be clear I’m not a security expert, just some lady whose had to deal with embedded cryptography from time to time.

If it helps, I worked at a BIOS company on one of the early UEFI firmwares (with Intel, who created the thing!) and we called it U-E-F-I, and same also at the major PC vendor I later worked for.

Much later I really cringed the first time I heard someone from MS say yoo-fi, but I’ve had to come around 😅 So I personally blame M$!

No worries that I’ll ever fuss at you over BIOS vs UEFI unless we’re dealing with a bootloader. Just make sure you have your boot order set right, and your secure boot settings the way you like (assuming UEFI), and the bootstrap fairy will bring your OS 🧡

Ohhh so that’s what they meant by putting IoT nodes on the Edge!

And if I remember correctly, I believe it has more weaknesses (especially potential unknown ones) than RSA.

But it’s definitely more efficient on embedded hardware, and for sure still gets used in that space. Not that I’d know cough cough