International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 02 July 2015

Jean-Pierre Flori, Jérôme Plût, Jean-René Reinhard, Martin Ekerå
ePrint Report ePrint Report
Generating and standardizing elliptic curves to use

them in a cryptographic context is a hard task.

In this note, we don\'t make an explicit proposal

for an elliptic curve, but we deal with the following

issues.

Security: We give a list of criteria that should be

satisfied by a secure elliptic curve. Although a few

of these criteria are incompatible, we detail what we

think are the best choices for optimal security.

Transparency: We sketch a way to generate a

curve in a fully transparent way so that it can be

trusted and not suspected to belong to a (not publicly

known to be) vulnerable class. In particular, since the

computational cost of verifying the output of such a

process may be quite high, we sketch out the format

of a certificate that eases the computations. We think

that this format might deserve being standardized.

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