A usability study of elliptic curves

Abstract

In the recent years, the need of information security has rapidly increased due to an enormous growth of data transmission. In this thesis, we study the uses of elliptic curves in the cryptography. We discuss the elliptic curves over finite fields, attempts to attack; discrete logarithm, Pollard’s rho algorithm, baby-step giant-step algorithm, Pohlig-Hellman algorithm, function field sieve, and number field sieve. The main cryptographic reason to use elliptic curves over finite fields is to provide arbitrarily large finite cyclic groups having a computationally difficult discrete logarithm problem.