Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is emerging as an attractive public-key cryptosystem for mobile/wireless environments. Compared to traditional cryptosystems like RSA, ECC offers equivalent security with smaller key sizes, which results in faster computations, lower power consumption, as well as memory and bandwidth savings. This is especially useful for mobile devices which are typically limited in terms of their CPU, power and network connectivity.
Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) was recently endorsed by the US government.
The Next Generation Crypto project focuses on three key components:
(a) the implementation of the ECC crypto library and security architectures for various platforms ranging from small sensors to high-performance web servers, (b) implementation of a common hardware architecture for accelerating ECC as well as RSA, and (c) enabling broad industry adoption of ECC by promoting ECC standardization within SSL, the dominant security protocol used on the Internet, and contributing ECC technology to OpenSSL and NSS/Mozilla the two most popular open source cryptographic libraries.
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