Technical Report

1.  Introduction
     
Chinese Data Security, Inc. (CHNDS) joins the highly visible effort by the national government in pushing for more and better Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) in Taiwan with the TTS digital signature scheme. TTS (Tame Transformation Signatures) is a secure, fast digital signature scheme that has been publicized at international conferences.  TTS (20,28), an instance of TTS that is comparable in security to RSA-1024, can sign at one-thousandfold the speed.  Its high speed and low resource requirements makes it especially suitable for low-cost smart cards.

CHNDS is sponsoring the TTS Challenge with prize money totally more than US$100,000 (about NT$3.4 million).

 

2. Security Estimates

Symmetric

system (bits)

ECC key

size (bits)

RSA key

size (bits)

TTS dimension

Money Prize

56

112

512

(16, 22)

US$ 1000

64

128

768

(20, 26)

US$ 2000

72

144

1024

(20, 28)

US$ 4000

80

160

1536

(24, 32)

US$ 8000

88

176

2048

(24, 34)

US$12000

96

192

2560

(28, 38)

US$16000

112

224

4096

(32, 44)

US$24000

128

256

6144

(36, 50)

US$36000

Notes:
1- Please refer to our website for rules to the TTS Challenge.
2- Cryptosystems listed in the same row have similar security.
3- Security estimates for RSA and ECC are taken from a report by EU's NESSIE project (http://www.cryptonessie.org/).
4- Please refer to publicly available documents [7] and [8] for references to TTS security.

 

3. Performance Comparisons

Scheme

ECDSA

(163 bits)

RSA-PSS

(1024 bits)

SFLASH

(26, 37)

TTS

(20, 28)

Key set-up

1.6 ms

2.7 sec

1.5 sec

15.8 ms

Signing

1.9 ms

84 ms

2.8 ms

0.045 ms

Verifying

5.1 ms

2.0 ms

0.39 ms

0.25 ms

Signature size

326 bits

1024 bits

259 bits

224 bits

Public key size

48 B

128 B

15.4 KB

8.6 KB

Private key size

24 B

320 B

2.4 KB

1.4 KB

Notes:
1- ECDSA (ECC signature scheme), ESA-PSS (RSA signature scheme) and SFLASH are the NESSIE-recommended signature schemes.  We excerpted their performance data from the NESSIE report.
2- We tested everything on a Pentium III/500MHz like NESSIE.
3- TTS, like SFLASH, is a `multivariate' cryptosystem.  The two are similar in principle.  All differences arises from their respective central maps, which leads to a large speed differential between the two signature schemes.

 

4. Performance Report

TTS

(message size [byte],

signature size [byte])

Pub. Key (byte)

Sec. Key (byte)

Test Platform 1

Test Platform 2

Setup

(ms)

Sign

(ms)

Verify

(ms)

Setup

(ms)

Sign

(ms)

Verify

(ms)

(16,22)

4400

879

6.2

0.028

0.13

0.9

0.004

0.01

(20,26)

7540

1254

11.8

0.037

0.22

1.8

0.006

0.02

(20,28)

8680

1399

15.8

0.045

0.25

2.2

0.007

0.02

(24,32)

13440

1864

24.0

0.057

0.38

3.7

0.009

0.03

(24,34)

15096

2039

32.8

0.068

0.42

4.4

0.011

0.03

(28,38)

21812

2594

48.0

0.087

0.63

7.5

0.012

0.05

(32,44)

33088

3444

89.0

0.110

0.94

13.2

0.017

0.07

(36,50)

47700

4414

132

0.152

1.32

21.6

0.022

0.10

Test Platform 1:        CPU: P3 500MHz;   RAM: 384MB;

OS: Win2K server + cygwin + gcc 3.2;     ARG: gcc -O3

Test Platform 2:        CPU: P4 2.4GHz;   RAM: 1024MB;  OS: Linux + gcc 3.3;

ARG: gcc -O3 -march=pentium4 -fomit-frame-pointer

 

5. On 8051 Smart Cards

Scheme

Platform

Clock

Private Key

Code Size

RAM

Signing Time

TTS

(20, 28)

Intel 8032AH

3.57

MHz

1.4KB

1.5KB

128B

198 ms

Intel 8051AH

1.6KB

224 ms

Winbond W77E58

99 ms

TTS

(24, 32)

1.5KB

112 ms

Intel 8051AH

284 ms

SFLASH

(26, 37)

2.4KB

3.3KB

344B

1.07 sec

Infineon SLE66

10 MHz

59 ms

RSA-1024

320B

N/A

> 1KB

many sec

NEC mPD789828*

40 MHz

100 ms

Infineon SLE66*

5 MHz

230 ms

RSA-2048

640B

1.1 sec

ECC-191

10 MHz

24B

180 ms

Notes:

1- A `*' symbol denotes a co-processor (hence costlier implementation)
2- The standard Intel 8051 is called 12T because an instruction cycle is 12 clock cycles. The Winbond W77E58 is 4T (hence some 2-3 times faster at the same clock rate), and the SLE66 part by Siemens-Infineon is said to be 2T (it really runs via a sixfold internal clock multiplier), and runs between 4 to 5 times as fast at the same clock rate.
3- Numbers for ECC, RSA, and SFLASH are taken from the NESSIE report and a recent paper discussing SFLASH implementation.  Numbers for TTS are excerpted from the paper [9].
4- Current conventional wisdom requires keys to be generated on-card. TTS both signs and generates keys at high speed without requiring expensive dedicated crypto hardware.  See the following Table.
5- Like most multivariates, TTS has relatively large public keys.  However, due to its fast key generation, only the private key is needed on card.  With suitable external commands, the smart card can synthesize the public key in conveniently-sized segments and have it output block-by-block.  This can be done at any time, so the public key size does not have a negative impact on the memory requirements of a TTS smart card implementation.

Scheme

Core

Private Key

Gen. Time

Gen. Code

EEPROM

TTS

(20, 28)

i8032AH

1399 B

62 sec

4.2 KB

1.2 KB

i8051AH

W77E58

29 sec

TTS

(24, 32)

i8051AH

1534 B

170 sec

1.6 KB

W77E58

79 sec

 

6. Related Web Sites
[1]    Chinese Data Security Inc., http://www.chnds.com.tw/
[2]    New European Schemes for Signatures, Integrity and Encryption (NESSIE) Project,
http://www.cryptonessie.org/
[3]    International Association for Cryptological Research (IACR),
http://www.iacr.org/


7. References
[4]    NESSIE Security Report, also can be found at the NESSIE website [2].
[5]    Performance of Optimized Implementations of the NESSIE Primitives, available at the NESSIE website [2].
[6]    T. Moh, A Public Key System with Signature and Master Key Functions, Communications in Algebra, 27 (1999), pp. 2207-2222.

[7]    J.-M. Chen and B.-Y. Yang, A More Secure and Efficacious TTS Signature Scheme, 6th International Conference on Information Security and Cryptology (ICISC 2003), Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Also can be found at IACR e-Print archive [3] http://eprint.iacr.org/2003/160
[8]   
B.-Y. Yang and J.-M. Chen, A Study in Security of  Tame-Like Multivariate Digital Signatures: A New TTS, ACISP 2005 - 10th Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag. Also can be found at IACR e-Print archive [3] http://eprint.iacr.org/2004/061

[9]    B.-Y. Yang, J.-M. Chen, and Y.-H. Chen, TTS: High-Speed Signatures on a Low-Cost Smart Card, CHES 2004 - Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol. 3156,  Springer-Verlag, pp. 371-385.
[10]  Akkar, Courtois, Duteuil, and Goubin, A Fast and Secure Implementation of SFLASH, PKC 2003, Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol. 2567, pp. 267-278.
[11]  B.-Y. Yang and J.-M. Chen, All in the XL Family: Thoery and Practice, ICISC 2004 - 7th International Conference on Information Security and Cryptology, Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol. 3506, Springer-Verlag, pp. 67-86.