[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
AFAIK, the only advantage of ECC is that the keys are shorter. The disadvantage is that it isn't as well studied.
Nate Lawson wrote:
Again, this is well covered. The reason is the fundamental difference in the performance of the best-known attacks (GNFS vs. Pollard's rho). http://www.vaf.sk/download/keysize.pdf
At the timpe that http://www.vaf.sk/download/keysize.pdf was published, 1024 bit asymmetric encryption over integers was comparable in strength to 80 bit symmetric encryption, and elliptic curve encryption over a 160 bit fields.
At that time integers based asymmetric encryption took about four times as long to compute as the comparable strength elliptic curve asymmetric encryption.
Since then, integer encryption has weakened further relative to elliptic curve encryption, due to advances in factorization and the discrete log problem, increasing the advantage of elliptic curves.
With widespread failure to use encryption due to the computational costs a factor of more than four is not to be sneezed at.
--------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
