# Anomalous Curves Part 1: Don't be clever with your elliptic curve order

$$\def\F{\mathbb{F}}$$

Have you ever been confused by the numbers $p,q,r$ in a paper dealing with elliptic curves? Some paper use $q$ for the order of the elliptic curve over a field of order $p$. Conveniently, other papers use the exact opposite notation, while some get original and use $r$ for the field size, or the order of a subgroup of the curve, or something else…

What if I told you there are curves where $p=q=r$? We could decide to only use these curves and never have to go back on page 2 of a paper to see what are $p,q$ or $r$!

Joke aside, these curves actually exist and go by the name of anomalous curves, that is, curves $E(\mathbb{F}_p)$ with $\# E(\F_p)=p$. If you know Hasse’s Theorem, you’ll understand why these curves are also called curves of trace one.

Here is an example:

E: y^2 = x^3 + 425706413842211054102700238164133538302169176474*x + 203362936548826936673264444982866339953265530166
p = 730750818665451459112596905638433048232067471723


Regardless of my rant on inconsistent notations for elliptic curves, using such curves could result in more elegant notation, or even a Nothing up my sleeve mechanism for choosing elliptic curves. Moreover, they could be use to derive efficient recursive proof systems without having to use cycles of elliptic curves.

It turns out that these curves are actually totally worthless for cryptography. Namely, the discrete logarithm problem can be solved in $O(\log p)$ on these curves. So these curves are secure only if their field arithmetic is intractable. Clearly not ideal.

This was discovered independently by Smart and Semaev in 1998-99.

In a coming series of posts, I will try to explore how these attacks work. I think they use some interesting math that is not commonly used in current cryptographic schemes.

For example, in pairing-based cryptography, we regularly use a field extension $\F_p \subset \F_{p^k}$ to, for example, capture the torsion points. In Smart’s attack, we use a dual of some kind; we look at a map $E(\mathbb{Q}_p) \to \tilde{E}(\F_p)$ and lift points over $\F_p$ to points over $\mathbb{Q}_p$. In the next post, I’ll explain what this means and how to use it to break ECDLP.