Elliptic Curve Cryptography - Anyone here ever implement this?

AARRRGH

Hello

I'm reading some books on Elliptic Curve Cryptography at the moment. The maths is very heavy, and none of the authors are making any effort to explain it in plain English!

My question is... have any of you implemented Elliptic Curve Cryptography?

How difficult was it?

At some stage I am going to write some code to show this in action, and I'm wondering if this is going to be a nightmare (I suspect it will!)

Thank you.

sobriquet

I can't say I have, and even if I had to I wouldn't be inclined to for working purposes. Something like ECC would be very complex but beyond that rolling your own for something you'd depend on for security is just a bad idea. Attacks on cryptosystems are much more often via flaws in the implementation rather than the idea as specified.

But as a proof of concept or as a learning exercise I'm sure it'd be fun. How's the DES cracker going btw?

I'm pretty sure I remember something about ECC being implemented in OpenSSL, could be some code to look at anyway.

ressem

There's learning implementations provided as C source code
http://www.manning.com/rosing/

Though you need to do all the reading to choose curves appropriate for crypto apparently.

Johnny Jukebox

The wonderful OpenSSL project (http://www.openssl.org) implements ECC in its crypto libraries.

Its written in the equally wonderful C language.

DublinDilbert

You should search for some of the work by Scott Vanstone of The university of waterloo on this topic, he was one of the leaders in the field when it was being developed. His earlier book is online http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/hac/ but i don't think it covers ECC, but is an excellent resource for general encryption.

Martyr

Modern cryptography: Theory and practice

has good info on ecc