Elliptic Curve Cryptography

For a reference on elliptic curves and their cryptographic applications, see: • Alfred J. Menezes, Elliptic curve public key cryptosystems, 1993. • Joseph H. Silverman and John Tate, Rational points on elliptic curves, 1992. (An undergraduate mathematics text on elliptic curves.) • J.W.S. Cassels, Lectures on elliptic curves, 1991. (Informal and mathematical.) An elliptic curve is not an ellipse! An ellipse is a degree 2 equation of the form x + ay = b. (However, given such an ellipse, you could try to compute the arc length of a certain portion of the curve; the integral which arises can be associated to an elliptic curve.)