One-way permutations on elliptic curves

Abstract

In recent years one-way functions have been shown to have important applications in cryptography, especially one-way functions that are also permutations. But even with the generality of this research, no function is known to be one-way and the few specific permutations believed to be one-way are all invertible in subexponential time. Elliptic curves offer new permutations that appear to require exponential time for inversion. The permutations are essentially generalizations of discrete exponentiation that rely on newly demonstrated correspondences between elements of elliptic curves and the integers. © 1991 International Association for Cryptologic Research.