text: Additionally, in August 2015, the NSA announced that it plans to replace Suite B with a new cipher suite due to concerns about quantum computing attacks on ECC.
  Patents
  While the RSA patent expired in 2000, there may be patents in force covering certain aspects of ECC technology, including at least one ECC scheme (ECMQV). However, RSA Laboratories and Daniel J. Bernstein have argued that the US government elliptic curve digital signature standard (ECDSA; NIST FIPS 186-3) and certain practical ECC-based key exchange schemes (including ECDH) can be implemented without infringing those patents.
  Elliptic curve theory
  For the purposes of this article, an elliptic curve is a plane curve over a finite field (rather than the real numbers) which consists of the points satisfying the equation:
  along with a distinguished point at infinity, denoted ∞. The coordinates here are to be chosen from a fixed finite field of characteristic not equal to 2 or 3, or the curve equation would be somewhat more complicated.
  This set of points, together with the group operation of elliptic curves, is an abelian group, with the point at infinity as an identity element. The structure of the group is inherited from the divisor group of the underlying algebraic variety: