Abstract | Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is one of the
most promising alternatives to conventional public
key cryptography, such as RSA and ElGamal, since
it employs keys of smaller sizes for the same level
of cryptographic strength. Smaller key sizes imply
smaller hardware units for performing the arithmetic
operations required by cryptographic protocols and,
thus, ECC is an ideal candidate for implementation
in embedded systems where the major computational
resources (speed and storage) are limited.
In this paper we present a port, written in ANSI C
for maximum portability, of an open source ECCbased
cryptographic library (ECC-LIB) to ATMELĒs
AT76C520 802.11 WLAN Access Point. One of the
major features of this port, not found in similar ports,
is that it supports Complex Multiplication (CM) for
the construction of Elliptic Curves with good security
properties. We present some experimental results that
demonstrate that the port is efficient and can lead to generic embedded systems with robust ECC-based
cryptographic protocols using cryptographically strong
ECCs generated with CM. As an application of the
ported library, an EC Diffie-Hellman key exchange
protocol is developed as an alternative of the 4-way
key handshake protocol of the 802.11 protocol. |