Elliptic-Curve Cryptography

Table 2: Approximate computational difficulties. This table compares the approximate difficulty of three different problems. Each row presents cryptanalysis tasks of roughly equivalent difficulty. "Bits" is the problem of guessing a secret key of the given bit size. "EC size" is the problem of calculating discrete logarithms in an elliptic-curve group with so many elements. Last, "Z^*_p size" is the problem of discrete logarithms in the Z^*_p group. The table comes from interpolating data presented by the IEEE P1363 working group.