ESIGN: An efficient digital signature implementation for smart cards

Abstract

ESIGN is an efficient digital signature algorithm [OkS, Ok], whose computation speed is more than twenty times faster than that of the RSA scheme, while its key length and signature length are comparable to those of the MA scheme. This paper presents a software implementation of ESIGN on an 8bit micro-processor smart card. This realizes a computation time for signature generation of about 0.2 seconds. To achieve this remarkable speed for signature generation, appropriate implementation techniques such as pre-computation and table look-up techniques are effectively used. Moreover, this software implementation is compact enough for smart cards; the program size and the data size including the work area are at most 3Kbytes each. Practical identification schemes based on ESIGN are also presented.