Paradigm shift for resource constrained cryptosystems

安全性在许多新兴的以及现有的通信和计算应用中是非常重要的问题，诸如云计算、电子健康和移动的无线通信。 例如，电子保健预计将处理大量的私人和敏感数据，包括医生、病人和服务提供者在内的各种用户都应在不同程度上获得这些数据。电子保健中的安全漏洞不仅可能导致患者和其他个人的隐私损失，而且还可能对用户对底层基础设施的信心造成长期损害。 今年早些时候，一组研究人员报告说，他们成功地打破了768位RSA密码系统使用复杂的计算设备，几个月后，美国国家标准与技术研究所提出了具体的建议，包括从2011年起将目前可接受的80位安全强度过渡到至少112位。在世界上几乎每一个司法管辖区，并将需要密码系统做更多的计算，在某些情况下，与相同数量的资源。这只会给小型器件的设计者带来巨大的压力，以满足严格的实施要求。 因此，有一个相当迫切的需要调查的各个方面的资源受限的密码系统的影响的过渡，并为此提出的研究的主要目标是（i）研究的影响，最近宣布增加的安全强度的重要性能矩阵，（ii）开发和测试新的低复杂度计算算法的密码应用，（iii）为资源受限的密码系统设计和原型化硬件架构，以及（iv）开发针对边信道分析攻击的有效对策。 该研究对加拿大公司处理嵌入式系统的安全性具有重要意义。它还将在加拿大缺乏技术人员的领域为高素质人员提供培训。

Security is a very important issue in many of emerging as well as existing communication and computing applications, such as cloud computing, e-health and mobile wireless communications. E-health, for example, is expected to deal with huge amount of private and sensitive data that ought to be accessible in various extents to a spectrum of users including doctors, patients and service providers. Security breeches in e-health may not only cause loss of privacy for patients and other individuals, but can also inflict long term damages on the users' confidence in the underlying infrastructure. Earlier this year, a group of researchers reported their success in breaking the 768-bit RSA cryptosystem using sophisticated computing equipment, and a few months later the USA National Institute of Standards and Technology came up with specific recommendations including the transition from the currently acceptable security strength of 80 bits to a minimum of 112 bits from year 2011 on. This paradigm shift will be felt in almost every jurisdiction in the world and will require cryptosystems to do a lot more computations, in some situations with the same amount of resources. This will simply put a significant pressure on the designers of small devices to meet stringent implementation requirements. As a result, there is a rather urgent need to investigate various aspects of resource constrained cryptosystems affected by the transition, and to this end the main objectives of the proposed research are to (i) study the impact of the recently announced increase in the security strength on important performance matrices, (ii) develop and test new low complexity computing algorithms for cryptographic applications, (iii) devise and prototype hardware architectures for resource constrained cryptographic systems, and (iv) develop efficient countermeasures against side-channel analysis attacks. The research is of high significance to Canadian companies dealing with security for embedded systems. It will also provide training for highly qualified personnel in an area where Canada lacks skilled people.