Accelerating the Secure Remote Password Protocol Using Reconfigurable Hardware

摘要

The Secure Remote Password(SRP)protocol is an authen- tication and key-exchange protocol suitable for secure pass- word verification and session key generation over insecure communication channels.The modular exponentiations in- volved,however,are very time-consuming,causing slow log- on procedures.This work presents the design of a hard- ware accelerator that performs modular exponentiation of very wide integers.The experimental platform is tutwlan, a Wireless Local Area Network(wlan)being developed at Tampere University of Technology.It runs on the Altera Ex- calibur development board that contains a microprocessor and a chip with programmable hardware.The results show that a full modular exponentiation with 1023-bit inputs can be performed in less than 40 ms using less than 10,000 logic elements,each consisting of a 4-input lookup table and a register.By using the implemented hardware accelerator in the authentication protocol,the execution time is reduced by a factor of 4.In addition,proposals to improve the imple- mented modular exponentiation architecture are presented. An additional factor of 5 improvement(totaling a factor of 20)can be achieved by implementing the fastest design.