15.11 THE CERTICOM CHALLENGE
The Certicom Corporation markets software products based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). According to their Web site www.certicom.com, the Certicom Intellectual Property portfolio includes over 350 patents and patents pending worldwide, covering many key aspects of ECC, including software optimizations, efficient hardware implementations, methods to enhance security, and various cryptographic protocols.
Certicom introduced the ECC challenge in November 1997. The ECC Challenge was introduced “to increase industry understanding and appreciation for the difficulty of the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem, and to encourage and stimulate further research in the security analysis of elliptic curve cryptosystems.”
The challenge is to compute the ECC private keys from the given list of ECC public keys and associated system parameters. There are two levels:
- Level 1: 109-bit and 131-bit challenges;
- Level 2: 163-bit, 191-bit, 239-bit, and 359-bit challenges.
Details can be found on their Web site.
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