Efficient transmission of PKI certificates using elliptic curve cryptography and its variants

The demand for wireless networks is increasing rapidly and it becomes essential to design existing Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) useful for wireless devices. A PKI is a set of procedures needed to create, distribute and revoke digital certificates. PKI is an arrangement that binds public keys with respective user identities by means of a Certificate Authority (CA). The user identity must be unique within each CA domain. The third-party Validation Authority (VA) can provide this information on behalf of CA. The binding is established through the registration and issuance process which is carried out by software at a CA or under human supervision. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is proved to be the best suited one for resource constrained applications. This paper compares the two PKI Algorithms ECC and Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA). It is found that ECC-based signatures on a certificate are smaller and faster to create; and the public key that the certificate holds is smaller as well. Verification is also faster using ECC-based certificates, especially at higher key strengths. The security of ECC systems is based on the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP), rather than the integer factorization problem. This allows for faster computations and efficient transmission of certificates.