The PASSERINE Public Key Encryption and Authentication Mechanism

PASSERINE 1 is a lightweight public key encryption mechanismwhich is based on a hybrid, randomized variant of the Rabin public key encryption scheme. Its design is targeted for extremely low-resource applications such as wireless sensor networks, RFID tags, embedded systems, and smart cards. As is the case with the Rabin scheme, the security of PASSERINE can be shown to be equivalent to factoring the public modulus. On many low-resource implementation platforms PASSERINE offers smaller transmission latency, hardware and software footprint and better encryption speed when compared to RSA or Elliptic Curve Cryptography. This is mainly due to the fact that PASSERINE implementations can avoid expensive big integer arithmetic in favor of a fully parallelizable CRT randomized-square operation. In order to reduce latency and memory requirements, PASSERINE uses Naccache-Shamir randomized multiplication, which is implemented with a system of simultaneous congruences modulo small coprime numbers. The PASSERINE private key operation is of comparable computational complexity to the RSA private key operation. The private key operation is typically performed by a computationally superior recipient such as a base station.