Elliptic Curve Cryptography messages vs keys encryption

Question

I have read a few tutorials about ECC implementaiton in C. What I am confused is this: Can I encrypt messages with ECC and without the use of any other algorithm, like AES, RSA or should I use them also?

What I mean is this: Can ECC alone can be used for text message encryption, or is it only for key generation?

Why to prefer the Hybrid? You are talking about ECDSA? ECDH? What is the name of the none Hybrid ECC I can look at? — just_learning, Jul 28 '19 at 20:03
Can ECDSA or/and ECDH go faster than pure ECC? Yes, I will take a look... — just_learning, Jul 28 '19 at 21:01
No duplicate! I am asking about something very specific! Not ECC in general! Also I compare ECC to other known protocols... — just_learning, Jul 28 '19 at 22:06
@just_learning I don't see it. That question seems to be purely about ECC, you specify you want to do it without RSA / AES etc. Please indicate what particular part of your question is not answered by the Q/A indicated as duplicate. Please be as specific as possible! — Maarten Bodewes, Jul 29 '19 at 23:34

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 28 '19 at 21:40

Hybrid cryptosystems, as @kelala has mentioned, are used in practice in favour of public-key encryption systems. It's not a particularity of Elliptic Curve vs Integer-Group based cryptosystems: it's rather that bit-twiddling (symmetric-key) cyphers are much faster than algebraic (public-key) ones.

So, what we do is to create a symmetric key and use a public-key scheme to encrypt it in the KEM/DEM paradigm (and also 2) and then use a symmetric scheme to actually encrypt.

Also, keep in mind that even if you do encryption wholly in an Elliptic Curve, you probably need a hash function at some point that maps the text message (a sequence of bytes) to a field element or a curve point itself. You can look up the work of Icart, Fouque, Tibouchi, Coron, Maurer and others, for examples of how to do this (depending on the curve family you're targetting)

Elliptic Curve Cryptography messages vs keys encryption

1 Answers1