Tunable balancing of RSA

Abstract

We propose a key generation method for RSA moduli which allows the cost of the public operations (encryption/verifying) and the private operations (decryption/signing) to be balanced according to the application requirements. Our method is a generalisation of using small public exponents and small Chinese remainder (CRT) private exponents. Our results are most relevant in the case where the cost of private operations must be optimised. We give methods for which the cost of private operations is the same as the previous fastest methods, but where the public operations are significantly faster. The paper gives an analysis of the security of keys generated by our method, and a new birthday attack on low Hamming-weight private exponents. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.