International Association
for Cryptologic Research

This paper analyzes the cost of breaking ECC under the following assumptions: (1) ECC is using a standardized elliptic curve that was actually chosen by an attacker; (2) the attacker is aware of a vulnerability in some curves that are not publicly known to be vulnerable.

This cost includes the cost of exploiting the vulnerability, but also the initial cost of computing a curve suitable for sabotaging the standard. This initial cost depends upon the acceptability criteria used by the public to decide whether to allow a curve as a standard, and (in most cases) also upon the chance of a curve being vulnerable.

This paper shows the importance of accurately modeling the actual acceptability criteria: i.e., figuring out what the public can be fooled into accepting. For example, this paper shows that plausible models of the \"Brainpool acceptability criteria\" allow the attacker to target a one-in-a-million vulnerability.