# How can I find the order of the group that an elliptic curve is defined over?

I have a Weierstrass elliptic curve ($y^2=x^3+a \times x+b \mod p$)

How can I find the order of the group itself? I have seen Mathematica has a GroupOrder[] command and WolframAlpha will do it for me, but how can I do it myself, mathematically?

The modulus, $p$, will be a large prime number, say 256 bits or more.

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The idea in SEA is that by studying the action of the Frobenius automorphism on the set of $\ell$-torsion points (defined by division polynomials) allows you to calculate the order modulo $\ell$. Do this for enough many small primes $\ell$, take into account the Hasse-Weil bound, and you are done. The details of the theory (the Elkies' bit in particular) run a bit deep. –  Jyrki Lahtonen Aug 23 '14 at 13:28

The number of points on the curve $|E({\mathbb F}_p)|$ is defined as $|E({\mathbb F}_p)|=p+1-t$ where $t$ is the so called trace of Frobenius. Using Hasse's theorem one can bound $t$ as $|t| \leq 2\sqrt p$, which gives you an estimation for the number of points for $E({\mathbb F}_p)$.
Now you could use a naive algorithm and simply run through all elements of ${\mathbb F}_p$ and determine whether they satisfy the curve equation to count the points, which however requires exponential time.
For cryptographic use you will typically require a prime order subgroup $G$ of $|E({\mathbb F}_p)|$ such that the value $h = \frac{|E({\mathbb F}_p)|}{ord(G)}$, the so called cofactor, is a small integer (typically $\leq 4$).