A (Relatively Easy To Understand) Primer on Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is a powerful but less understood type of cryptography in wide use today. It provides a significantly more secure foundation than first generation public key cryptography systems like RSA, based on currently understood mathematics. ECC is the next generation of public key cryptography and makes sense to adopt for ensuring the highest level of security while maintaining performance. The elliptic curve discrete logarithm is the hard problem underpinning ECC, which has not been solved yet despite almost three decades of research. This means that for numbers of the same size, solving elliptic curve discrete logarithms is significantly harder than factoring, making ECC a stronger cryptographic system.