Elliptic Curve Primality Prover ------------------------------- Included in this package is an implementation of the elliptic curve primality proof algorithm. The implementation here should work reasonably well for primes up to about 1000 bits in size. Beyond 1000 bits, I suspect that the precision of RR needs to be extended or more entries are needed in the discriminant array. COMPILING: To make this software, do the following: (1) Edit Makefile to ensure that NTLPREFIX is correctly set. (2) Type 'make'. Note: for (1), if the NTL header files are located in /opt/local/include/NTL/ and the library is named /opt/local/lib/libntl.a, then NTLPREFIX should be set to /opt/local. Note: for best results, compile NTL to use GMP as its underlying large integer package (LIP). The Makefile assumes you have done this. If you aren't using GMP, you may need to remove the '-lgmp' from the NTLLIB line. INTERFACE: This software is not yet complete and not intended for users who wish to actually prove primes. The primary audience for this software is developers wishing to improve upon this implementation, developers wishing to write their own implementation, and any others who wish to learn about the ECPP algorithm. The ecpp-test program provided will prove the primality of randomly generated primes. The program takes a single argument that indicates the size of the prime to be chosen (in bits). Note that this program does not currently initialize the random number generator so it will prove the same prime every time (given a constant argument). PERFORMANCE: This software has not yet been optimized. It can prove a 1000 bit number in about 3 minutes on a 1 GHz machine. Questions, comments, problems, or other concerns can be emailed to: chris.studholme@utoronto.ca -- END OF README --