[cm2187]

Is there any alternative to factoring for asymmetric cryptography? I was under the impression even elliptic curves are based on factoring (though not a cryptographer myself). If that’s the case we would have to live in a world with no asymmetric encryption. That would be interesting.

[rocqua]

I believe elliptic curves aren't broken by factoring. You might be confused with shor's algorithm. That is a quantum-algorithm that breaks both elliptic curves and RSA.

It doesn't break elliptic curve crypto by factoring numbers. Instead, it breaks them by solving the discrete logarithm problem.