6. Status of the Certicom ECC Challenge The challenge was released on November 6, 1997, at 1 p.m. EST. The table below shows which problems have been solved so far. Here, the date given as end date indicates the day of submission of the solution to Certicom. Challenge End Date Elliptic Curve Operations Iterations per second* Machine Days* ECC2-79 Dec. 16, 1997 1.7 x 1012 170000 116 ECC2-89 Feb. 9, 1998 1.8 x 1013 187000 1114 ECC2K-95 May 21, 1998 2.2 x 1013 149000 1709 ECCp-79 Dec. 6, 1997 1.4 x 1012 314000 52 ECCp-89 Jan. 12, 1998 2.4 x 1013 388000 716 ECCp-97 Mar. 18, 1998 2.0 x 1014 361000 6412 * on 500 MHz Digital Alpha workstation running Linux Since the algorithms for all problems were based on Pollard's rho method [Pollard], the number of elliptic curve operations indicated above is the same as the number of iterations in the rho method. The fourth column of the table indicates how many such iterations per seconds were performed by the challenge solvers' routines on a 500 MHz Alpha workstation, which was a typical machine used in the computations. Here, any speed-up going from smaller to larger field sizes is due to code optimization. The penultimate column shows how many machine days on a 500 MHz Alpha would have been necessary if the whole computation had been performed on a single such machine running 24 hours a day. All problems except the ECCp-79 problem were solved using the parallelized Pollard rho method due to van Oorschot and Wiener [VW]; for the ECCp-79 problem, a parallelized Brent-type cycle-finding algorithm was used. Furthermore, for the ECC2K-95 problem the number of iterations was reduced since the iterations were performed on orbits rather than on individual points (cf. [GLV]). For details about the solved challenge problems, click here. For an implementation report of the solution of some of the exercises, see [Escott].

Copyright © Certicom Corp., 1997-2000. All rights reserved. Information subject to change. http://www.certicom.com