ZDNet: Open-Source Group Gets Sun Security Gift

“Sun Microsystems has donated new cryptography technology to an
open-source project at the heart of many secure transactions on the
Internet.

“Sun’s ‘elliptic curve’ technology is involved in the process of
using keys to encrypt and decrypt information for electronic
transactions. Such encryption lets people buy products online, for
example, while shielding their credit card number from prying eyes.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based server seller donated the technology
to the OpenSSL project, a programming group that makes an
open-source version of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption
system.

“Elliptic curve cryptography will enable secure communications
with devices that don’t have as much calculating power as most
desktop computers, said Whitfield Diffie, Sun’s chief security
officer and a pioneer of the Diffie-Hellman ‘public key’
cryptography method used today in SSL and other encryption systems.
Diffie spoke Thursday during a news conference at the SunNetwork
conference here…”

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