When updating software in IoT, there is a wish to have signatures that are very compact and are light to verify. There exist solutions for that, in particular Rabin-Williams signatures with data recovery that make use of a variant of RSA with public exponent 2. Due to the dominance of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), and more recently, the perceived threat of quantum computers, these solutions did not get the attention they deserve. Still, ecc signatures are one or two orders of magnitude heavier to verify and quantum computers may turn out to be too expensive to deploy to be a threat to these applications. In this thesis we will explore these solutions and specify and program a proof-of-concept. The type of work includes reading on existing solutions, drafting a specification of the target system, writing reference and possibly optimized code and benchmarking on low-end CPUs such as ARM Cortex M4.
If you are interested in this topic, please send an email to Joan Daemen via joan@cs.ru.nl .