Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 August 2016
Consider two ordinary elliptic curves $E,E^{\prime }$ defined over a finite field
$\mathbb{F}_{q}$, and suppose that there exists an isogeny
$\unicode[STIX]{x1D713}$ between
$E$ and
$E^{\prime }$. We propose an algorithm that determines
$\unicode[STIX]{x1D713}$ from the knowledge of
$E$,
$E^{\prime }$ and of its degree
$r$, by using the structure of the
$\ell$-torsion of the curves (where
$\ell$ is a prime different from the characteristic
$p$ of the base field). Our approach is inspired by a previous algorithm due to Couveignes, which involved computations using the
$p$-torsion on the curves. The most refined version of that algorithm, due to De Feo, has a complexity of
$\tilde{O} (r^{2})p^{O(1)}$ base field operations. On the other hand, the cost of our algorithm is
$\tilde{O} (r^{2})\log (q)^{O(1)}$, for a large class of inputs; this makes it an interesting alternative for the medium- and large-characteristic cases.