A high speed RSA processor

With the explosion of electronic data communications and computer networks, it has become important to develop new ways to guarantee their security. Two techniques are available: the private key system (e.g. DES), and the public key systems (e.g. RSA). The private key systems are more widely used than the public key systems because they are fast and easy to implement, but they suffer from serious disadvantages such as lower security and complexity in distribution of the key. Public key systems provide much higher security levels and no need for key distribution. However, their use has been limited to key distribution for the private key systems because they are very slow. The paper describes three techniques for increasing the speed of the central computational process in the RSA algorithm, i.e. modular exponentiation. Together they achieve a speed improvement of about 7 to 1. >