Michigan Technological University

This paper describes a visualization tool ECvisual that helps students understand and instructors teach elliptic curve based ciphers. This tool permits the user to visualize elliptic curves over the real field and over a finite field of prime order, per-form arithmetic operations, do encryption and decryption, and convert plaintext to a point on an elliptic curve. The demo mode of ECvisual can be used for classroom presenta-tion and self-study. With the practice mode, the user may go through steps in finite field computations, encryption, decryption and plaintext conversion. The user may com-pute the output for each operation check each answer for correctness. This helps students understand the primitive operations and how they are used in an elliptic curve ci-pher. The opportunity for self-study provides an instructor greater flexibility in selecting a lecture pace for this detail-filled material. Classroom evaluation was positive and very encouraging