ECC stands for Elliptic Curve Cryptography and is an alternative approach to public key cryptography over standards such as RSA.

Before you consider issuing and installing an ECC SSL cert, you should analyze your needs and be aware about the compatibility issues.

ECC is a new standard and it is not supported on all OS/Browsers, but also not supported on some popular infrastructures. e.g. an ECC cert is not supported on:

  • Windows XP — IE7
  • Chrome on XP
  • Cloudfront on AWS (as of February 2016)

And the list goes on..

https://support.globalsign.com/customer/portal/articles/1995283-ecc-compatibility

“The environmental crisis is all a result of rushing.” — Ed Begley, Jr.

Using ECC is a good idea, and it makes sense if you can live with the compatibility issues.

If you can’t, then you can issue separate certificates (RSA and ECC) and install them on your infrastructure as needed.

I could easily issue a duplicate certificate in DigiCert and have separate RSA and ECC certificates that i could install on my AWS infrastructure. Yay!

Also, one simple way to issue an additional RSA cert is Let’s Encrypt, but i still prefer to have one issuer and a central location to manage all certificates.

Originally published on Medium.