Global Effort Solves Elliptic Curve Crypto Challenge; Confirms 97-bit Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm is Harder than Factoring 512-bit RSA.

PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 28, 1999--

Irish mathematician Robert Harley announced today the solution to the seventh and most difficult Certicom ECC Challenge problem so far. The solution was arrived at by 195 volunteers in 20 countries after 40 days of calculation distributed on 740 computers.

This computation, coordinated from INRIA (the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control), has confirmed theoretical predictions that a 97-bit code based on elliptic curves is harder to break than a 512-bit code based on factorization such as RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman). "Our results increase confidence in codes based on properly-chosen elliptic curves, and should be thm) problem for fifteen years, industry leaders such as RSA Security Inc. have adopted them only recently. To encourage research into cryptographic applications of elliptic curves and thereby strengthen the case for ECC (Elliptic Curve rovides a rough index of the strength of ECC.

DETAILS

The "ECC2-97 problem" involved a set of nearly 10 to the 29th points on an elliptic curve chosen by Certicom. The participants attacked ECC2-97 by calculating 119,248,522,782,547 (well over 10 to the 14th) of the poce. A final phase of processing selected two matHarley's team was lucky enough to find the solutwas detected just hours later, a less than one in a hundred chance! Even so, the project used approximately y harnessing some of the huge computational powect against growing threats."

"Understandiand colleague of Mr. Harley. "For example, our recent analysis of the WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) suite agreed that RSA is too power-hungry for hand-held devices,tibank's Corporate Technology Office in New York and one of the main contributors to the recent successful attack on the 512-bit RSA challenge, compared the two computational efforts and noted that the present result makes 160-bit ECC keys look even better compared to 1024-bit RSA keys, from a security point of view. "Ideally we would like new theoretical advances to further reinforce these practical resre now close to the 112-bit limitation that manys of the US$5000 prize will be donated to the Free Software Foundation whereas the remaining US$1000 will go to Paul Bourke at the Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Stut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique France University of New South Walelecom Labs UK Internetww.4K-Associates.com/

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