IMPLEMENTING ELLIPTIC CURVE CRYPTOGRAPHY USING MICROSOFT EXCEL

摘要

Microsoft Excel offers a number of data manipulation tools that are extensively used to solve many business problems.However in Engineering and Computing Science these easy to use features are seldom used to solve appropriateproblems. Instead most of the problems are solved using specific tools such as MATLAB.The Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) algorithm is one of the most well-known and secure public-key encryption methodsused for secured data transmission. However because of growth of mobile and wireless devices and the constraints oflimited bandwidth, storage, and power associated with these devices Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is beingincreasingly adopted to provide adequate security with less computational resources. To determine the public key,and to encrypt and decrypt messages for ECC algorithm one has to use complex mathematical calculations. Manystudents of Introductory Computer Security courses without adequate mathematical background find it difficult toapply ECC algorithm to compute appropriate public keys and encrypt and decrypt messages. In this paper authorattempts to show how the ECC algorithm can be modeled with Microsoft Excel, and how Excel can easily andeffectively be used to encrypt and decrypt messages. The author uses several examples to show the viability of theusage of Excel to implement ECC algorithm. The author finds that the Excel can be easily used in the classroom todemonstrate how the ECC algorithm functions. The author also discusses the limitations and practical issues relatedto using Excel.