Re: [TLS] Hardware Implementations .. Re: On Curve25519 and other possibilities (e.g. ietf256p, ietf384p, ietf521p,

[Hannes Tschofenig <[e-mail]>]

Hi Joachim,

On 06/27/2014 10:21 AM, Joachim Strömbergson wrote:
> Aloha!
> 
> Hannes Tschofenig wrote:
>> Based on the discussions at the IRTF interim meeting a little while
>> ago I took the Curve25519 code and ported it to mbed (the online
>> development platform ARM provides, see https://mbed.org).
> 
>> I wanted to know how long it takes to generate key pairs since this
>> is one of the most performance-demanding operations. To my surprise
>> it was rather fast:
> 
>> - 0.278821 seconds for generating a Curve25519 key pair on a Cortex
>> M0 (FRDM-KL25Z, 48MHz) https://mbed.org/handbook/mbed-FRDM-KL25Z
> 
>> - 0.047394 seconds for generating a Curve25519 key pair on a Cortex
>> M3 (LPC1768, 96MHz) https://mbed.org/platforms/mbed-LPC1768/
> 
> Great work and information! Have you done a write-up of the results? I'm
> very interested in info on the code size and data memory during operation.

No, I haven't created a write-up yet. I believe I should make take a
look at other curves first to have a reasonable comparison.

I will try to put something together for the upcoming IETF meeting
(since it might be relevant to the LWIG working group).

(Code size and RAM size is a bit tricky since there is some other stuff
that need to be compiled into the code to make it useful.)

> 
>> (Note that I did not include the calculation of the random numbers
>> in those numbers since it will depend on a variety of factors,
>> including the hardware capabilities of the used board.)
> 
> So how did you do the random generation? Fixed values or some other
> mechanism?
This is probably more an issue of embedded systems (rather than the TLS
working group in general) but I had to put fixed values in there since I
didn't want to rely on the library that some other person wrote and a
hardware random number generator was only available with another board
but the core mbed libaries do not yet offer the API.

In a nutshell, I used fixed values.

Ciao
Hannes