Two-way public key authentication and key agreement for low-cost terminals

摘要

A method for achieving mutual authentication and session key agreement between a first party 12 which has minimal computational resources and a second party 18 which has substantial computational resources utilizes a modular square root operation for certificate authentication and key distribution and an ElGamal, NIST DSS, or other efficient signature operation for obtaining the signature of a message. These operations are highly advantageous in a system with asymmetric resources because the computation power required to perform these operations is far less than the computation power required to invert these operations. The entire mutual authentication and session key agreement method can be carried out using only three modular multiplications on the weak computational side.