An evangelist for elliptic-curve cryptography

Sometimes, it can take a decade or more before you get to say "I told you so." Just ask Scott Vanstone.

The founder of Certicom Corp. shifted his company from standard public-key cryptography systems to the untested elliptic-curve approach in 1985, only to wait almost 20 years before the National

Security Agency officially endorsed elliptic curve this fall. Though Certi­com built up a base of success in wireless realms, it had to endure the snickers of RSA Security Inc. and other public-key specialists throughout the '90s.

Vanstone was not the type for whom embedded implementations of algorithms, or even computer science and engineering, were second nature. He was a mathematician specializing in set theory at the University of Waterloo in Toronto in the late 1970s, interested only in theoretical realms until the debate over the openness of public-key cryptography sparked his interest at decade's end.

After performing applied research in cryptography in his university classes, Vanstone launched Certicom in 1985 to implement existing public keys in ASICs. The fortuitous presentation of an IBM paper on elliptic curve that same year convinced Vanstone that Certicom would be a "me too" company unless it shifted to new crypto methods and focused on nondesktop areas that companies like RSA had ignored.

With his company getting some overdue recognition in the intelligence community, Vanstone has suggested new directions for bringing public-key infrastructure technology into the manufacturing supply chain. He also stays busy at the University of Water­loo and tries to convince colleagues in math departments that they should be as active in forming startups as academics in computer science, EE and biotech.

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