High-speed high-security signatures

Abstract

This paper shows that a $390 mass-market quad-core 2.4GHz Intel Westmere (Xeon E5620) CPU can create 109000 signatures per second and verify 71000 signatures per second on an elliptic curve at a 2128 security level. Public keys are 32 bytes, and signatures are 64 bytes. These performance figures include strong defenses against software side-channel attacks: there is no data flow from secret keys to array indices, and there is no data flow from secret keys to branch conditions.