Elliptic curves with a given number of points over finite fields

Given an elliptic curve $E$ and a positive integer $N$, we consider the problem of counting the number of primes $p$ for which the reduction of $E$ modulo $p$ possesses exactly $N$ points over $\mathbb F_p$. On average (over a family of elliptic curves), we show bounds that are significantly better than what is trivially obtained by the Hasse bound. Under some additional hypotheses, including a conjecture concerning the short interval distribution of primes in arithmetic progressions, we obtain an asymptotic formula for the average.Comment: A mistake was discovered in the derivation of the product formula for K(N). The included corrigendum corrects this mistake. All page numbers in the corrigendum refer to the journal version of the manuscrip

On the Distribution of Atkin and Elkies Primes

Given an elliptic curve E over a finite field F_q of q elements, we say that an odd prime ell not dividing q is an Elkies prime for E if t_E^2 - 4q is a square modulo ell, where t_E = q+1 - #E(F_q) and #E(F_q) is the number of F_q-rational points on E; otherwise ell is called an Atkin prime. We show that there are asymptotically the same number of Atkin and Elkies primes ell < L on average over all curves E over F_q, provided that L >= (log q)^e for any fixed e > 0 and a sufficiently large q. We use this result to design and analyse a fast algorithm to generate random elliptic curves with #E(F_p) prime, where p varies uniformly over primes in a given interval [x,2x].Comment: 17 pages, minor edit