Security and Performance Evaluation of ESIGN and RSA on IC Cards by Using Byte-Unit Modular Algorithms

Digital signature is by far one of the most important cryptographic techniques used in the e-govemment and e-commerce applications. It provides authentication of senders or receivers and offers non-repudiation of transmission (senders cannot deny their digital signature in the signed documents and the document cannot be altered in transmission without being detected). This paper presents our implementation results of digital signature algorithms on IC cards by using byte-unit modular arithmetic algorithm method [13], [20]. We evaluated the performance of well-known ESIGN and RSA digital signature algorithms on the dedicated IC card chips and showed that ESIGN is more efficient than RSA.