Re: Elliptic curves, current status?

[Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com>]

On Sun, 26 Nov 1995, Norman Hardy wrote:

> There are many parameters to an elliptic curve crypto system.
> I haven't seen any taxonomy of which kinds are good and which
> have been shown to be week. In contrast there seems to be a
> consensus about how to pick primes for RSA or Diffie-Hellman.

The IEEE p1363 group's working draft on elliptic curve standard may help 
you here.  You can find it at ftp://ftp.rsa.com/pub/p1363/draft/ec.ps

One reason for confusion about the speed of elliptic curve cryptosystems is 
the small number of implementations.  A paper in Crypto 95 claimed that 
for doing key exchange, an elliptic curve algorithm takes about the same 
time and has about the same level of security as DH with 512 bit modulus, 
and that elliptic curve has a speed advantage if greater security is 
desired.

Wei Dai