High-speed ECC based kerberos authentication protocol for wireless applications

We improved Kerberos authentication protocol for wireless communication using elliptic curve cryptographic operations. Proposed protocol offers the strength of public key cryptography and costs only 68.7 ms extra load to standard Kerberos without using pre-computation tables for 160-bit curve and scalable architecture, whereas with customized curve library it costs 57.3 ms extra load for the same key length. Using pre-computation tables reduces these timings to 55.8 ms and 51.6 ms respectively. Proposed protocol requires less bandwidth than other public key cryptography enabled Kerberos solutions. Results were obtained using 32-bit StrongARM1 processor runs 206 MHz. Due to its bandwidth efficiency and fast execution performance ECC supported Kerberos protocol can be an important option among other user authentication protocols for wireless networks.