Arithmetic of elliptic curves

Abstract

Elliptic curves constitute one of the main topics of this book. They have been proposed for applications in cryptography due to their fast group law and because so far no subexponential attack on their discrete logarithm problem (cf. Section 1.5) is known. We deal with security issues in later chapters and concentrate on the group arithmetic here. In an actual implementation this needs to be built on an efficient implementation of finite field arithmetic (cf. Chapter 11).