[crypto] [tanja at hyperelliptic.org: ECC 2014 & Scott Vanstone]

[R. Hirschfeld]

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Date: 20 Mar 2014 10:42:15 -0000
From: Tanja Lange <tanja at hyperelliptic.org>
To: ecc10 at hyperelliptic.org
Subject: ECC 2014 & Scott Vanstone

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In memoriam Scott A. Vanstone

We are saddened by the death of Scott A. Vanstone. Scott was
instrumental in raising awareness for ECC and convincing the world of
its benefits for applications. The ECC workshop series would not exist
without Scott. In 1997, he and Alfred Menezes organized a workshop in
Waterloo, the "Workshop on the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm
Problem" which was a big success and started the ECC series.

We honored Scott at ECC 2010 by presenting him an award for "Seminal
contributions to research, development, standardization and
commercialization of elliptic curve cryptography." The award ceremony
and Scott's acceptance speech are online. Scott tells in his own words
his journey since the early days of cryptography to widespread
adoption of ECC in all kinds of electronic devices. He closed his
speech with the words

    We can do Suite B on this, by just changing the key size. So
    anyway, ECC is here to stay and I'm honored and proud to be part
    of this history. I hope it continues. It's been a wonderful ride,
    and I can't thank the organizing committee enough for bestowing
    this great honor upon me. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Scott, for getting us started on this ride. We will miss
you but will continue it without you.

The IACR has published a long obituary for Scott. Scott was a fellow
of the IACR "For essential work on the deployment of Elliptic Curve
Cryptography, sustained educational leadership in applied cryptology,
and service to the IACR."
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