Elliptic curves are a mathematical structure. In cryptography, it is common to use the structure $y^2 = x^3 + ax^2 + b$ over a finite field. Questions relating to elliptic curves and derived algorithms should use this tag and might also consider specific tags such as discrete-logarithm and ecdsa.

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Besides key and ciphertext sizes what are other advantages of elliptic curve versions of various protocols?

There are elliptic curve variants of Diffie-Hellman, ElGamal, DSA and possibly other protocols/algorithms. I know that these elliptic curve variants have smaller key and ciphertext sizes which will ...
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Why is elliptic curve cryptography not widely used, compared to RSA?

I recently ran across elliptic curve crypto-systems: An Introduction to the Theory of Elliptic Curves (Brown University) Elliptic Curve Cryptography (Wikipedia) Performance analysis of identity ...
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Using same keypair for Diffie-Hellman and signing

Are there any security risks using a single key-pair for both key-exchange and signing? I'm mainly interested in using Curve25519 for key-exchange and Ed25519 for signing. But similar combinations, ...
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Can we use elliptic curve cryptography in wireless sensors?

Can we use elliptic curve cryptography in wireless sensors? If so, how do you map points to message characters?
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Mapping points between elliptic curves and the integers

My primary question is: Is there an easy way to create a bijective mapping from points on an elliptic curve E (over a finite field) to the integers (desirably to $\mathbb{Z}^*_q$ where $q$ is the ...
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1answer
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Does the elliptic curve (EC) cryptosystem outperform RSA and DL cryptosystems?

Throughout the literature, it is stated that EC cryptosystems outperform RSA and Discrete logarithm cryptosystems, but I cannot understand how ECC would be more efficient than RSA and DL in terms of ...
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Compressing EC private keys

For reasonable security, EC private keys are typically 256-bits. Shorter EC private keys are not sufficiently secure. However, shorter symmetric keys (128-bits, for example) are comparably secure. I ...
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1answer
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Families of public/private keys in elliptic curve cryptography

I'm looking for a related key scheme for elliptic curve cryptography. The basic idea would be that there would be a master public key and a master private key. From the master public key, you could ...
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Why are elliptic curve variants of RSA “chiefly of academic interest”?

Yesterday I was thinking about elliptic curve variants of popular protocols/algorithms (ECDH, ECES[1], etc) and the thought occured that I had never seen an elliptic curve variant of RSA. My ...