Mapping multiplicity aspects of secure communications into efficient parallel processing

Certification in public key cryptographic applications concerns the involvement of a CA (Certifying Agent) in approving the validity of users' public keys. Distributed certification pertains to the case where several CAs are involved in issuing certificates. This also includes the case of multiattribute certification, where different CAs approve different user's attributes. In delegated certification, agents transfer certificate issuing authority in hierarchical chain. Efficient certificate verification is of a specific need in ad-hoc networks, as such a verification has to be performed each time new parties have to be engaged in secure communications. Distributed, multi-attribute and delegated certification techniques having a low computational complexity are presented in this paper. It is shown how multiplicity aspects of the various applications are mapped into a multiplied exponents mathematical operation of the form Π^m_i=1 A_i^b_i mod p. Hardware implementation of this operation boils down to one exponentiator and a multiplexer, with execution time equivalent to one exponentiation.