Speaker: 

Nick Alexander

Institution: 

UCI

Time: 

Monday, November 8, 2010 - 5:30pm

Location: 

RH 306

In 2003, the National Security Agency (NSA) payed Certicom, a small Canadian security company, 25 million dollars for the right to use Certicom's elliptic curve cryptography technology. We will introduce elliptic curves and their applications to cryptography and computer security, and suggest why the NSA paid so much. Then we will describe the computationally important "point counting problem", which is necessary for efficient elliptic curve cryptography. We will survey some recent research that "counts points" on certain elliptic curves.