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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:21:02 ADT
Paulo Barreto (pbarreto@nw.com.br)
Thu, 30 Jul 1998 22:49:13 -0300
At 08:49 1998.07.30 -0500, Mike Rosing wrote:
>
>
>On Tue, 28 Jul 1998, Bill Stewart wrote:
>
>> That's not realistic; understanding why algorithms are strong
>> (as opposed to merely understanding how to implement them well)
>> requires more mathematics than the average technical college graduate has.
>> Most engineers know calculus quite well, and some differential equations,
>> but haven't spent any time doing group theory, or even much number theory,
>> but you can't do much crypto without them - and elliptic curves
>> are much hairier than basic RSA. And even among experts,
>[...]
>
>But it need not be that way. ECC isn't that hard once the basic number
>theory is down. I concur that's how it is now, and we'll see if I can
>fix the problem sometime in the next 6 months.
Understanding the ECC counterparts of conventional DL algorithms is indeed
not harder than understanding the conventional ones. I guess the
perplexity people often shows regarding EC is caused by the (surprising)
fact that elliptic curves do present their properties. The truly difficult
part is perhaps the point counting algorithms (the underlying theory is
really, really heavy).
Paulo Barreto.
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:21:02 ADT