IMPLEMENTING ELLIPTIC CURVE CRYPTOGRAPHY ON PC AND SMART CARD

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is a relatively new branch of public key cryptography. Its main advantage is that it can provide the same level of security as RSA with significantly shorter keys, which is beneficial for a smart card based implementation. It is also important as a possible alternative of RSA. This paper presents the author´s research concerning ECC and smart cards. The authors introduce their ECC prototype implementation that relies on Java Card technology and is capable of running on smart cards. Test results with various cards are attached. It is also analyzed in what extent algorithms with the complexity of ECC can be executed in smart card environment with limited resources

A Survey of Elliptic Curve Cryptography Implementation Approaches for Efficient Smart Card Processing

Smart cards have been used for many different purposes over the last two decades, from simple prepaid credit counter cards used in parking meters, to high security identity cards intended for national ID programs. This has increased data privacy and security requirements. Data protection and authentication is now demanded for performing Electronic payment and allow secure multi-level access to private information. ECC uses smaller key sizes compared to traditionally used RSA based cryptosystems. Elliptic Curve Cryptography is especially suited to smart card based message authentication because of its smaller memory and computational power requirements than public key cryptosystems. It is observed that the performance of ECC based approach is significantly better than RSA and DSA/DH based approaches because of the low memory and computational requirements, smaller key size, low power and timing consumptions

Public key cryptography in resource-constrained WSN

In this paper we present a detailed review of the works on public key cryptography (PKC) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In the early days of sensor networks, public key cryptography was thought to be completely unfeasible considering its computational complexity and energy requirements. By this time, several works have proved that the lightweight versions of many well-known public key algorithms can be utilized in WSN environment. With the expense of a little energy, public key based schemes could in fact be the best choice for ensuring data security in high-security demanding WSN applications. Here, we talk about the notion of public key cryptography in WSN, its applicability, challenges in its implementation, and present a detailed study of the significant works on PKC in WSN

Atomicity Improvement for Elliptic Curve Scalar Multiplication

Abstract. In this paper we address the problem of protecting elliptic curve scalar multiplication implementations against side-channel analysis by using the atomicity principle. First of all we reexamine classical assumptions made by scalar multiplication designers and we point out that some of them are not relevant in the context of embedded devices. We then describe the state-of-the-art of atomic scalar multiplication and propose an atomic pattern improvement method. Compared to the most efficient atomic scalar multiplication published so far, our technique shows an average improvement of up to 10.6%

Area Flexible GF(2k) Elliptic Curve Cryptography Coprocessor

Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is popularly defined either over GF(p) or GF(2k). This research modifies a GF(p) multiplication algorithm to make it applicable for GF(2k). Both algorithms, the GF(p) and GF(2k) one, are designed in hardware to be compared. The GF(2k) multiplier is found faster and small. This GF(2k) multiplier is further improved to benefit in speed, it gained more than 40% faster speed with the cost of 5% more area. This multiplier hardware is furthermore adjusted to have area flexibility feature, which is used as the basic block in modeling a complete projective coordinate GF(2k) ECC coprocessor

A Touch of Evil: High-Assurance Cryptographic Hardware from Untrusted Components

The semiconductor industry is fully globalized and integrated circuits (ICs) are commonly defined, designed and fabricated in different premises across the world. This reduces production costs, but also exposes ICs to supply chain attacks, where insiders introduce malicious circuitry into the final products. Additionally, despite extensive post-fabrication testing, it is not uncommon for ICs with subtle fabrication errors to make it into production systems. While many systems may be able to tolerate a few byzantine components, this is not the case for cryptographic hardware, storing and computing on confidential data. For this reason, many error and backdoor detection techniques have been proposed over the years. So far all attempts have been either quickly circumvented, or come with unrealistically high manufacturing costs and complexity. This paper proposes Myst, a practical high-assurance architecture, that uses commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, and provides strong security guarantees, even in the presence of multiple malicious or faulty components. The key idea is to combine protective-redundancy with modern threshold cryptographic techniques to build a system tolerant to hardware trojans and errors. To evaluate our design, we build a Hardware Security Module that provides the highest level of assurance possible with COTS components. Specifically, we employ more than a hundred COTS secure crypto-coprocessors, verified to FIPS140-2 Level 4 tamper-resistance standards, and use them to realize high-confidentiality random number generation, key derivation, public key decryption and signing. Our experiments show a reasonable computational overhead (less than 1% for both Decryption and Signing) and an exponential increase in backdoor-tolerance as more ICs are added