High Performance ECDSA over F (2) based on Java with Hardware Acceleration

Many E-Commerce applications are characterized, for instance, by their demand for confidential data exchange via public communication networks (e.g., Internet). These data exchanges must be protected from fraudulent access by third parties. One way is to use public key crypto systems based on elliptic curves. They gain more and more acceptance, since they provide high security in spite of their small key sizes. We introduce an elliptic curve based crypto provider, featuring ECDSA, within the Java Cryptography Architecture for the sake of flexibility and platform independence. Furthermore we present a FPGA based CryptoProcessor, which raises the performance significantly. The design of the CryptoProcessor is supported by a custom VHDL model generator.