Point Counting on Elliptic and Hyperelliptic Curves

In present work we study the algorithms for point counting on elliptic and hy- perelliptic curves. At the beginning we describe a few simple and ineffective al- gorithms. Then we introduce more complex and effective ways to determine the point count. These algorithms(especially the Schoof's algorithm) are important for the cryptography based on discrete logarithm in the group of points of an el- liptic or hyperelliptic curve. The point count is important to avoid the undesirable cases where the cryptosystem is easy to attack. 1