The RSA algorithm has been established as a well accepted standard to transport data encrypted over unsecure channels. It is featuered by a wide variety of web browsers. But on an embedded system the deciphering of a 1024-Bit RSA key can take up to one minute. Moreover the growing request for security demands the use of stronger keys as soon as possible.

In the bygone years an alternative public key algorithm on the base of elliptic curves has been developed, which is known as ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography). A special characteristic of these algorithms is the fact, that in this case the necessary calculations are not directly performed with numbers, but with other objects, called points on the elliptic curves. Because of this structure some special vulnerabilities are not existing. Hence the used key- and parameterlengths can be reduced without loss of security. These algorithms are especially attractive for low performance systems equiped with meager memory.

The result is a tiny and efficient as well as an extensive and interoperable ECC implementation. Because of the efficient ECC implementations and some assembler language optimizations specially adapted for the target platform, the key exchange lasts now about 7 seconds without any loss of security.