[Cryptech Tech] Key generation and storage

[Peter Gutmann]

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Joachim_Str=F6mbergson?= <joachim at secworks.se> writes:

>What we have previously discussed is having the random number generation and
>modexp operations in the FPGA, and having things like primality testing etc
>in SW on the ARM.

Yeah, that makes sense.

>It would be a bit of a hairball doing them in HW. But a restricted engine
>like PicoBlaze might be able to do it.

It depends what you want to do, in terms of complexity RSA/DH << DSA << ECDSA,
where each "<<" is about an order of magnitude (for ECDSA it may be more). You
can probably do RSA/DH keygen in a PicoBlaze, doing Lim-Lee for DSA is
probably not feasible, and doing ECDSA is painful enough as it is on a full-
blown CPU without trying to go to a restricted one.

Peter.