ECC vs RSA 4096

Just noticed that Enigmail now uses ECC by default to generate a PGP keypair, instead of RSA. Educate a noob on ECC. Is it safer than RSA 4096? Do they allow you to do the same things as RSA keys (e.g. sign binary files, plaintext files, provide people with a plaintext file with your public key, etc.)?

a special form of ecc is quantum secure. Doubt they use it but ecc can be better. Basic ECC is either way computationally cheaper at no security loss which is neat when you want to save battery.

>Is it safer than RSA 4096? depends what key size. The main advantage of ECC is the smaller key sizes for the same (classical) security. It's actually a lot weaker to Shor's algorithm though. >>10702 >a special form of ecc is quantum secure. I have heard this but I have also heard that it was proved to be weaker than some other schemes.

>>10706 >depends what key size. The release notes for Enigmail just state: "If GnuPG 2.1 or newer are used, then key creation will default to ECC keys" Had a look at seahorse after generating a default keypair with Enigmail, and just saids (to sign and certify): Type: EdDSA Strength: 256 The type for encryption is ECDH. Having a look into some more docs (https://wiki.gnupg.org/ECC), it appears to be this one: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8032#section-5.1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdDSA#Ed25519 Would this be as secure as RSA 4096?

>>10707 >Would this be as secure as RSA 4096? probably not, but I think it's competitive with 2048. 4096 is still considered a very large key size.

>>10707 >Would (((EdDSA))) be as secure as RSA 4096? 256-bit Ed25519 is more secure than 4096-bit RSA

ECC get popular coz they are considered "secure enuff" but faster than RSA so they get popular in stuff that handles gazilions of crypto operations per second/

>ECC is NSA's invention to generally weaken crypto. Coming Soon™ to your imageboards.