Comparing Elliptic Curve Cryptography and RSA on 8-bit CPUs

Strong public-key cryptography is often considered to be too computationally expensive for small devices if not accelerated by cryptographic hardware. We revisited this statement and implemented elliptic curve point multiplication for 160-bit, 192-bit, and 224-bit NIST/SECG curves over GF(p) and RSA-1024 and RSA-2048 on two 8-bit microcontrollers. To accelerate multiple-precision multiplication, we propose a new algorithm to reduce the number of memory accesses.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: CHES
• Authors: Nils Gura, Arun Patel, Arvinderpal Wander, Hans Eberle, Sheueling Chang Shantz
• Keywords: CHES 2004, Computationally Expensive, Cryptography, Curve Point Multiplication, Strong Public-key Cryptography