by josh perry, editor
[email protected]

researchers at the massachusetts institute of technology (mit) in cambridge, mass. have created a new chip to perform public-key encryption protocols that uses 1/400 of the power that software execution of the protocols would, uses 1/10 of the memory, and works 500 times faster.

mit researchers have built a new chip, hardwired to perform public-key encryption, that consumes only 1/400 as much power as software execution of the same protocols would. (mit)

as an article from the mit website explained, public-key encryptions allow computers to share information after recognizing a pre-determined encryption code. the growing popularity of the internet of things (iot) across a wide range of commercial products would stretch the energy and memory consumption of software solutions to its limit, so mit researchers used elliptic-curve encryption for a solution.

unlike previous efforts using elliptic-curve encryption, the researchers created a solution capable of handling any curve.

“to create their general-purpose elliptic-curve chip, the researchers decomposed the cryptographic computation into its constituent parts,” the article explained. “elliptic-curve cryptography relies on modular arithmetic, meaning that the values of the numbers that figure into the computation are assigned a limit. if the result of some calculation exceeds that limit, it’s divided by the limit, and only the remainder is preserved. the secrecy of the limit helps ensure cryptographic security.”

the chip’s modular multiplier can handle 256-bit numbers, which far exceeds standard 16- or 32-bit multiplications. researchers also added an inversion circuit to again cut the power consumption in half.

“the most common encryption protocol to use elliptic-curve cryptography is called the datagram transport layer security protocol, which governs not only the elliptic-curve computations themselves but also the formatting, transmission, and handling of the encrypted data,” the article noted.

“in fact, the entire protocol is hardwired into the mit researchers’ chip, which dramatically reduces the amount of memory required for its execution.”