Elliptic Curve DSA

Elliptic Curve DSA (ECDSA) is a variant of the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) which operates on elliptic curve groups. As with elliptic curve cryptography in general, the bit size of the public key believed to be needed for ECDSA is about twice the size of the security level, in bits. By comparison, at a security level of 80 bits, meaning an attacker requires about the equivalent of about 280 signature generations to find the private key, the size of a DSA public key is at least 1024 bits, whereas the size of an ECDSA public key would be 160 bits. On the other hand, the signature size is the same for both DSA and ECDSA: 4t bits, where t is the security level measured in bits, that is, about 320 bits for a security level of 80 bits.
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