Divya Ramanathan
Independent Researcher
India
Abstract
This manuscript presents a comparative study of RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) and ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) as applied to securing web applications. It examines their theoretical foundations, computational complexity, key management, and real-world deployment through case studies of SSL/TLS implementations in Apache and Nginx servers. Methodology involves performance benchmarking, security analysis against known attack vectors up to 2015, and evaluation of key-size equivalence. Results demonstrate that ECC offers comparable security to RSA at significantly smaller key sizes, resulting in reduced computational overhead and bandwidth usage. Conclusions highlight the trade-offs between maturity and performance, recommending ECC for resource-constrained environments while acknowledging RSA’s widespread adoption in legacy systems. The study is aligned with engineering practices as of 2015, ensuring technologies and references are limited to that period.
Keywords
RSA, ECC, Web Application Security, SSL/TLS Performance, Cryptographic Engineering
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