On the Performance of ESIGN and RSA on IC Cards

The advancement of information and communications technology, especially the Internet, has created an opportunity to improve the administrative efficiency and service quality in governments of many nations. However, due to the lack of communication security services, sensitive documents could not be transmitted securely over open networks using off-the-shelf software. Digital signature is by far one of the most important cryptographic techniques used in the e-government and e-commerce applications. It provides authentication of senders or receivers (they are who they claim to be) and offers non-repudiation of transmission (senders can‘t deny their digital signature in the signed documents and the document cannot be altered in transmission without being detected). This paper presents our efforts in the implementation of digital signature algorithms on IC cards. We evaluated the performance of well-known ESIGN and RSA digital signature algorithms on the Hitachi H8/300 8-bit IC card chips. Keyword IC card, digital signature, PKI, ESIGN, RSA