Jump to Content

Fast Elliptic Curve Cryptography in OpenSSL

Financial Cryptography and Data Security: FC 2011 Workshops, RLCPS and WECSR, Springer

Abstract

We present a 64-bit optimized implementation of the NIST and SECG-standardized elliptic curve P-224. Our implementation is fully integrated into OpenSSL 1.0.1: full TLS handshakes using a 1024-bit RSA certificate and ephemeral Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange over P-224 now run at twice the speed of standard OpenSSL, while atomic elliptic curve operations are up to 4 times faster. In addition, our implementation is immune to timing attacks - most notably, we show how to do small table look-ups in a cache-timing resistant way, allowing us to use precomputation. To put our results in context, we also discuss the various security performance trade-offs available to TLS applications.