RFID implementation and performance analysis of a short MQQ digital signature

Abstract

Contactless smart cards (RFID cards) have been widely used for manyapplications such as epassport, ebanking, transit fare payment and accesscontrol systems. These cards have limited resources for performing arithmeticand logical operations and storing data along with program code. Asasymmetric cryptographic algorithms, performs time consuming complexoperations and demands more resources therefore these operations are performedin the special co-processors inside smart cards. The implementationof these extra co-processors increase the cost of smart cards.Recently a new algorithm Multivariate Quadratic Quasigroup (MQQ) hasbeen proposed for asymmetric cryptography and it is claimed that decryptionoprations are faster than already existing algorithms (RSA, ECC) [17].Eventually, a digital signature scheme based on MQQ has been proposedand it is named as MQQ-SIG [28]. In original MQQ public key algorithmthe size of private and public key was quite large in (KBytes). The size ofprivate key has been significantly reduced in MQQ-SIG scheme. Due tothis improvement in the private key size, it becomes possible to implementsigning procedure of MQQ-SIG inside contactless smart card. The fastsigning speed and simple operations performed in signing makes MQQSIGan appealing choice for smart cards which has constrained resourcescomparatively to other devices such as mobile cell phones and personalcomputers (PC).In this thesis we have implemented the digital signature part of MQQ-SIGalgorithm in Java for the 8-bit contactless smart card from the NXP familyJCOP 41 V2.2.1. These cards have Java Card Virtual Machine (JCVM)which enables limited features of Java. This is a completely original workand as far as we know there are no other Java implementations of MQQSIGdigital signature.Key generation part of MQQ is quite time consuming and therefore can notbe implemented inside smart cards. Similarly, verification part of MQQSIGutilize public key for verification of signed message. The public keyof MQQ scheme is quite large in hundreds of KBytes and therefore cannot be stored inside smart cards. These two parts of MQQ-SIG has beenimplemented on desktop computers and are not part of our Master thesis.