What is Elliptic Curve Cryptography?
Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) was discovered in 1985 by Victor Miller (IBM) and Neil Koblitz (University of Washington) as an alternative mechanism for implementing public-key cryptography. Public-key algorithms create a mechanism for sharing keys among large numbers of participants or entities in a complex information system. Unlike other popular algorithms such as RSA, ECC is based on discrete logarithms that much more difficult to challenge at equivalent key lengths. Metering deployments can have stringent bandwidth requirements, and at the same time, require a high level of security. The overhead associated with adding security to command and control packets sent to a meter can be prohibitive, and severely degrade network performance. These deployments can also be fielded for up to 20 years. ECC offers strong security, efficiency and scalability over conventional public-key cryptography algorithms making it well suited in bandwidth constrained applications. Likewise, ECC is the
