Elliptic Curves in Cryptography

The reach of algebraic curves in cryptography goes far beyond elliptic curve or public key cryptography yet these other application areas have not been systematically covered in the literature. Addressing this gap, Algebraic Curves in Cryptography explores the rich uses of algebraic curves in a range of cryptographic applications, such as secret sh

An entire chapter is dedicated to elliptic curves since there is great hope that advances in this area will bring higher levels of security to many embedded devices. Compared to previous public key systems, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) promises equivalent security strength with smaller key sizes. Since key size impacts storage and in general has been shown to impact performance and thus energy dissipation, these elliptic curves are of great interest to embedded systems. The notion of using elliptic curves in cryptography is generally agreed to have emerged from two famous papers: those of Miller (1986) and Koblitz (1987).

Elliptic curves cryptography was introduced independently by Victor Miller (Miller, 1986) and Neal Koblitz (Koblitz, 1987(Koblitz, ) in 1985. .At that time elliptic curve cryptography was not actually seen as a promising cryptographic technique.As time progress and further research and intensive development done especially on the implementation side, elliptic curve cryptography is now being implemented widely.Elliptic curves cryptography offers smaller key size, bandwidth savings and faster in implementations when compared to the RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) cryptography which based its security on the integer factorization problem.The most interesting feature of the elliptic curves is the group structure of the points generated by the curves, where points on the elliptic curves form a group.The security of elliptic curves cryptography relies on the elliptic curves discrete logarithm problem.The elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem is analogous to the ordinary algebraic discrete logarithm problem, l = g x , where given the l and g, it is infeasible to compute the x.Elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem deals with solving for n the relation P = nG.Given the point P and the point G, then it is very hard to find the integer n.To implement the discrete logarithm problem in elliptic curve cryptography, the main task is to compute the order of group of the curves or in other words the number of points on the curve.Computation to find the number of points on a curve, has given rise to several point counting algorithms.The Schoof and the SEA (Schoof-Elkies-Atkin) point counting algorithms will be part of the discussion in this chapter.This chapter is organized as follows: Section 2, gives some preliminaries on elliptic curves, and in section 3, elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem is discussed.Some relevant issues on elliptic curve cryptography is discussed in section 4, in which the Diffie-Hellman key exchange scheme, ElGamal elliptic curve cryptosystem and elliptic curve digital signature scheme are discussed here accompanied with some examples.Section 5 discussed the two point counting algorithms, Schoof algorithm and the SEA (Schoof-Elkies-Atkin) algorithm.Following the discussion in section 5, section 6 summaries some similarities and the differences between these two algorithms.Section 7 gives some brief literature on these two point counting algorithms.Finally, section 8 is the concluding remarks for this chapter. Elliptic curvesElliptic curves obtained their name from their relation to elliptic integrals that arise from the computation of the arc length of ellipses (Lawrence & Wade, 2006).Elliptic curves are www.intechopen.com Cryptography and Security in Computing1 1 2 3 4 2 2 4 Fig. 1.1. 2(1 ) (1 ) yx x x   www.intechopen.com

The use of public-key cryptosystems (PKC) received considerable attention. They are beneficial in encryption as well as signing which play an essential role in electronic banking and financial transactions. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is one of best public key techniques because of its small key size and high security. Secure applications in smart cards present implementation challenges particular to the platform's memory, bandwidth, and computation constraints. ECC's unique properties make it especially well suited to smart card applications. ECC systems provide the highest strength per bit of any cryptosystem known today. The paper presents a new method for smart card implementation of elliptic curves, explaining how ECC can not only significantly reduce the cost, but also accelerate the deployment of smart cards in new applications. ECC permits reductions in key and certificate size that translate to smaller memory requirements (especially for EEPROM), which represent significant cost savings. This added functionality can play an effective role in electronic payment and online banking technologies.

This paper examines the cryptographic security of fixed versus random elliptic curves over the field GF(p). Its basic assumption is that a large precomputation to aid in breaking the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP) can be made for a fixed curve. We take this into account when examining curve security as well as considering a variation of Pollard's rho method where computations from solutions of previous ECDLPs can be used to solve subsequent ECDLPs on the same curve. We present a lower bound on the expected time to solve such ECDLPs using this method, as well as an approximation of the expected time remaining to solve an ECDLP when a given size of precomputation is available. We conclude that adding 5 bits to the size of a fixed curve to avoid general software attacks and an extra 6 bits to avoid attacks on special moduli and a parameters provides an equivalent level of security.

The data everywhere was being transferred for each second using domain of Internet of Things (IoT). To secure data using the Internet of Things (IoT) is a tedious task. When the data is being transferred using Internet of Things (IoT), more security can be provided using elliptic curve cryptography. Asymmetric cryptography is used by most of the applications for providing secure communication between two parties (Weber in Comput Law Secur Rev 26:23–30, 2010). The purpose of this type of cryptography is the requirement of huge amount of computation and storage. This is where the use of elliptic curve cryptography comes into picture, as it needs less storage and can be used in small computational devices. ECC needs smaller key sizes and provides stronger encryption compared to various asymmetric cryptographic algorithms like RSA. The usage of power required is low but the performance of the devices using ECC is high for different types of devices like IoT, sensors, etc. This paper shows how ECC must be implemented strongly for providing communication securely to encode the data on an elliptic curve, in IoT devices. The encryption of the data must be done securely while mapping the data on to the elliptic curve. This paper shows how the data is encrypted and mapped on to the curve securely. The work shows how the data can be encrypted with ECC and how it can be visible to only authorized users. In the field of cryptography, ECC is a method for asymmetric cryptography which is dependent on the algebraic structure of an elliptic curve on the finite field.

Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) can ensure an equivalent security with much smaller key sizes. Elliptic curve scalar multiplication (ECSM) is a fundamental computation used in ECC. This paper focuses on ECSM resisting simple power attack and safe error attack of side-channel attack specifically. Elliptic curve complete addition (CA) formulae can achieve secure ECSM algorithms but are inefficient from memory and computational cost perspectives. Another secure ECSM, which uses (extended) affine, is more efficient for both memory and computational costs. However, it scans input scalars from right to left. In this paper, our developed scalar multiplication algorithms also use their extended affine, but scan from left to right (LR). We also prove the security of our LR ECSM algorithms and analyze them both theoretically and experimentally. Our new LR ECSM algorithms can reduce the amount of memory by \(37.5\%\) and reduce the computational time by more than \(40\%\) compared to Joye’s regular 2-ary LR algorithm with CA formulae.

The elliptic curve cryptography is almost used in the literature to develop the public key cryptosystems. A new general-purpose symmetric key cryptosystem using elliptic prime curves is proposed in this paper. For a given prime number P, there are many elliptic prime curves on which each point in the quadrant (0,0) to (P-1,P-1) lays. The set of minimum number of eligible elliptic prime curves for a given prime number P constitutes a lookup table that is the secret key of the proposed cryptosystem. The sender can pick up one eligible elliptic curve for each 2n-bit plaintext block. The sender sends two integers cipher for each 2n-bit plaintext block with encryption rate = 0.8. Moreover, a small prime number can be used efficiently with high security and good robustness against brute force attack.

A promising direction for constructing cryptographically stable pseudo-random sequence generators is an application of transformations in a group of points of elliptic and hypereliptic curves. This will allow building evidence-stable crypto algorithms, the problem of finding the private key in which is associated with solving a theoretically complex elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem. This paper proposes a method for generating pseudo-random sequences of the maximal period using transformations on elliptic curves. This method consists in the application of recurrent transformations with sequential formation of elements of points group of elliptic curves. This allows providing the maximum period of pseudo-random sequences with the reduction of the problem of finding the private key to the solution of the theoretically complex elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem. The block diagram of the device for generating pseudo-random sequences and the scheme for generating the internal states of the generator are given. We also present the results of statistical testing of some generators, which show that the generated sequences are indistinguishable in a statistical sense from truly random ones.KeywordsPseudo-random sequencesElliptic curvesMaximum period

Elliptic curves are beautiful mathematical objects that again and again appear in the most surprising places. Their history certainly originates at least in ancient Greece, whereas the study of arithmetic properties of elliptic curves as objects in algebra, geometry, and number theory traces back to the nineteenth century. Curiously, the earliest use of the term “elliptic curve” in the literature seems to have been by James Thomson in 1727 in “A Poem sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton”: “He, first of Men, with awful Wing pursu’d the Comet tro’ the long Elliptic Curve.” In 1985, Koblitz and Miller independently proposed to use elliptic curves in cryptography which can only be described as a magnificent and practical application of elliptic curves. This paper intends to mostly present a low-brow introduction of elliptic curves and their use in real-world applications of public-key cryptography.

There have been many digital signature schemes were developed based on the discrete logarithm problem on a finite field. In this study, we use the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem to build new collective signature schemes. The cryptosystem on elliptic curve allows to generate digital signatures with the same level of security as other cryptosystems but with smaller keys. To extend practical applicability and enhance the security level of the group signature protocols, we propose two new types of collective digital signature schemes based on the discrete logarithm problem on the elliptic curve: i) the collective digital signature scheme shared by several signing groups and ii) the collective digital signature scheme shared by several signing groups and several individual signers. These two new types of collective signatures have combined the advantages of group digital signatures and collective digital signatures. These signatures have a fixed size and do not depend on the number of members participating in the creation of the final collective signature. One of the advantages of the proposed collective signature protocols is that they can be deployed on top of the available public key infrastructures.

With the rapid development of the Internet, many users start to take action putting personal or company information on it, and share with everyone. The Internet is public as it were, if we do not control its limit of authority to assure security, it's possible that those attackers do illegal access of important information and destroy them. Not only personal privacy is invaded, but the mass property damage. Therefore, effective access control system has been more and more emphasized these days. To fight against these network attacks, it is necessary to establish an effective and safe access control system; here we proposed a scheme, a key management which called Lagrange interpolation mainly takes access control model as framework, and use Elliptic Curve Cryptography system to enhance security. The fact we choose Lagrange interpolation is the key we use is randomized, no relationship between each key, so is relatively hard. As Elliptic Curve Cryptography system, we want attackers to encounter Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem. Once the prime number is big enough, attackers will have trouble deciphering the key. Access control is so comprehensive, such as electronic documents, online television system sand wireless networks and so on, from previous literature; mobile agent technology applied in access control and key management would waste space and do exist some flaws in security, also we still have a lot of works to do on medical application. Hence, we propose these schemes in mobile agent in order to reach improvement, and then analyze of security and try to simulate what attackers will do. We conclude four common attacks: External Collective Attack, Internal Attack, Collusion Attacks and Equation Breaking Attack. As results, attackers are hard to decipher the key because of no relationship between each key and will face Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem. We confirm that the proposed schemes can be more efficiently and safety to protect mobile agent.

Elliptic curves are some specific type of curves known as hyper elliptic curves.Compared to the integer factorization problem(IFP) based systems, using elliptic curve based cryptography will significantly decrease key size of the encryption.Therefore, application of this type of cryptography in systems that need high security and smaller key size has found great attention.Hyperelliptic curves help to make key length shorter.Many investigations are done with regard to improving computations, hardware and software implementation of these curves, their security and resistance against attacks.This paper studies and analyzes researches done about security and efficiency of hyperelliptic curves.

A pairing over an elliptic curve E(F <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">pm</sub> ) to an extension field of F <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">pmk</sub> has begun to be attractive in cryptosystems, where k is called the embedding degree. The cryptosystems using a pairing are called the pairing-based cryptosystems. The embedding degree k is also an indicator of the relationship between the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP) and the discrete logarithm problem (DLP), where ECDLP over E(F <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">pm</sub> ) is reduced to DLP over F <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">pmk</sub> . An elliptic curve is determined by j-invarient or order, however the explicit condition between these parameters and an embedding degree has been described only in some degrees. In this paper, we investigate a new condition of the existence of elliptic curves with pre-determined embedding degrees, and present some examples of the elliptic curves over 160-bit, 192-bit and 224-bit F <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">pm</sub> .

Cloud computing represents a significant challenge for securing data due to its inherently distributed model. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) will provide substantial security with smaller key sizes, creating a strong candidate for cloud-based environments. This review critically examines ECC based security architectures in cloud computing with the aim of reducing the cipher space for efficiency and scalability. A comprehensive examination of recent ECC implementations guided this review, including identity-based and lightweight ECC Architectures. Specific consideration was given to cipher space reduction techniques incorporating point compression and optimized scalar multiplication. The review provided evidence of a gap in the literature regarding the ability to counterbalance strength of security with the compactness of the cipher across a range of cloud scenarios and use cases. Most models considered provide little flexibility for real-time or post-quantum alternatives. None of the literature considered cipher space optimization for ECC to date. The ongoing optimization of cipher space is essential to progressing security based on ECC implementations for cloud scenarios. Future research efforts must centre on adaptive, efficient, quantum resilient ECC schemes, in ways that yield high security with minimum impacts on the operational scale, and the associated computational loads.