Research And Design Of USBKEY Base On PKI/ECC

With the rapid progress of open network system, the system of PKI is widely used and popularized. The participant in network is authenticated by digital certificate. The digital certificate is acquired from CA and saved in computer system on hard disk or floppy disk. However, because of the some shortages of CA and the open environments of the computer application, the hidden troubles of security often occur and the USBKEY is a good solution to the difficulty discussed above.USBKEY is the new generation identity authentication product composed of cryptography, smart card and USB technology. USBKEY has evolved from smartcard technique, and is a new generation product of authentication that involves cryptography, smart card and USB techniques. Due to the easy-to-use of USB, USBKEYs are widely used in various application fields of PKI. The USBKEYs in present use operate on the basis of RSA algorithm, which has the longer pair-key length and lower pair-key acquiring speed. On the other side, ECC algorithm provides the highest strength-per-bit than RSA and has also many other merits over normal public-key crypto systems such as less computation overheads, shorter key size, considerable bandwidth saving, and so on.This paper illustrates the design and implementation of ECC based USBKEY. The realization of hardware is mainly discussed. The USBKEY hardware layer includes hardware circuits, COS and USB firmware. The USB device driver and the application programming are also discussed in the paper.The design and prototype implementation of this paper are the primary explorations for the ECC authentication solution with USBKEY. This author hopes the applied native solution designed on the basis of the paper will help a litter to promote the security level for the authentication architecture in China. The design in this paper is a successful attempt. Hope to have some references to designing the same type of system in the future.