|
Derek's InfoNet
The
Birth of a New Site! - 4/19 12:05 AM - Derek Yuan
This
week, the Security Area Advisory Group, a committee in the Internet
Engineering Task Force voted to make 128-bit Triple-DES encryption a mandatory
component of the IPSec standrad. This high powered algorithmn will replace
56-bit DES as the encryption tool. A participant in the group said this was a
result of the concern of the ease of cracking DES.
RSA Data Security Receives Patent for Elliptic Curve (ECC)
Interoperability - 4/07 10:42 PM - Derek Yuan
RSA Data Security, Inc., a wholly owned
subsidiary of Security Dynamics Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:SDTI), announced
today that it has been awarded a U.S. patent on a new, efficient way of
converting between two popular but incompatible implementations of elliptic
curve cryptography (ECC), overcoming a significant obstacle in this emerging
area of cryptography. The new technique, known as "storage-efficient
basis conversion," holds the promise of promoting interoperability
between disparate devices employing ECC, particularly consumer devices such as
smart cards and PDAs.
Elliptic curve cryptography is emerging as
a viable security method for use in certain constrained environments such as
smart cards, pagers, cell phones and PDAs where memory, processing power or
communications bandwidth may be limited. ECC is well suited to these
applications because it requires a shorter key size than other cryptographic
methods to achieve equivalent security against currently known attacks, and
can therefore be implemented more efficiently.
However, there are many incompatible ways
to represent the numbers used in ECC cryptosystems and no memory-efficient way
to convert between polynomial basis and normal basis, two popular numbering
systems used today, resulting in fragmented deployment.
"RSA Data Security has received its
first patent in this field for a cost-effective way of converting between
these two popular ECC implementations," said Burt Kaliski, chief
scientist and director of RSA Laboratories. "The invention described in
the patent may enhance interoperability because the overhead for adding
conversion capabilities to devices is now only a small fraction of the amount
previously required for conversion."
Conversion methods commonly used today
employ a digit-by-digit process and a large table stored in memory that shows
how numbers in one system correspond to numbers in the other system.
Converting the 160-bit string commonly used in ECC systems requires a table
25,600 bits in size. This becomes too expensive in very constrained
environments like a smart card, which often may have only 65,536 bits of total
memory.
RSA's invention reduces memory requirements
for conversion from 25,600 bits to as little as 320 bits. RSA has submitted
this method to the IEEE P1363 standards committee as an informational
contribution.
Manufacturers designing chips to perform
ECC computations generally build their hardware to be most efficient when
processing only one of these numbering systems. Furthermore, the heavy storage
requirement of current conversion methods has prevented the use of basis
conversion, forcing manufacturers to choose one method or the other and
resulting in the emergence of different, proprietary systems that create an
obstacle to interoperability.
According to Kaliski, manufacturers wanting
to employ elliptic curve technology will no longer have to wait on the
sidelines to see which of these two major competing methods gains the greatest
market share, and they can design their products using the method that works
best for their particular implementations without having to worry about
conversion to the other.
My Name is Derek
Yuan, and I am from North Carolina
This is for
Sumogirl!
|