A novel approach for secure and fast generation of RSA public and private keys on SmartCard

RSA based SmartCards have been widely used in security services such as secure data transmission in many applications over the past few years. Generation of a secure key pair which is based on finding a pair of large prime numbers is an indispensable part of creating a secure channel. This paper describes a novel approach for secure and fast key generation of the public key cryptographic algorithm of RSA. This method has been implemented on a typical SmartCard equipped with a crypto-coprocessor and a true random number generator. An efficient method for generating the large random prime numbers is proposed that considerably reduces the total time required for generating a key pair. The key generation process is based on selecting an appropriate public key from a set of pre-defined public keys and computing the private key using the Euclid's extended algorithm. The measurements at a 4MHz main clock frequency have revealed that the mean time for generating 512, 1024 and 2048 bits RSA key pair are 2.85, 6.82 and 44.78 seconds, respectively. That is up to 50% reduction in total generation time compared to the latest reported methods.