The Magic of Elliptic Curves and Public-Key Cryptography

Abstract

Elliptic curves are beautiful mathematical objects that again and again appear in the most surprising places. Their history certainly originates at least in ancient Greece, whereas the study of arithmetic properties of elliptic curves as objects in algebra, geometry, and number theory traces back to the nineteenth century. Curiously, the earliest use of the term “elliptic curve” in the literature seems to have been by James Thomson in 1727 in “A Poem sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton”: “He, first of Men, with awful Wing pursu’d the Comet tro’ the long Elliptic Curve.” In 1985, Koblitz and Miller independently proposed to use elliptic curves in cryptography which can only be described as a magnificent and practical application of elliptic curves. This paper intends to mostly present a low-brow introduction of elliptic curves and their use in real-world applications of public-key cryptography.