ABSTRACT

Elliptic Curve Cryptography recently gained a lot of attention in industry. The principal attraction of ECC compared to RSA is that it offers equal security for a smaller bit size, thereby reducing processing overhead. ECC is ideal for constrained environment such as pager, PDAs, cellular phones and smart cards. For the implementation of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) the plaintext encoding should be done before encryption and decoding should be done after decryption. ECC Encryption and Decryption methods can only encrypt and decrypt a point on the curve and not messages. The Encoding(converting message to a point) and Decoding (converting a point to a message) are important functions in Encryption and Decryption in ECC. The paper discusses Koblitz’s method to represent a message to a point and viceversa. The paper also describes implementation results of Koblitz’s Encoding and Decoding methods.