CipherActive's research team continuously develops new methods, keeping the company's superior advantage. The researches combine two disciplines:

• Mathematical – new mathematical method in order to improve calculation processes.
• Embedded coding – extensive experience and know-how in various platforms, including CISC, RISC and DSP.

Typical encryption process in modern eCommerce applications includes two stages.

• The first stage performs authentication between the parties and exchanges a session key, this stage employs public key algorithms such as RSA and Diffie-Hellman.
• In the second stage actual data is encrypted and sent using symmetric key encryption algorithm such as DES.

Figure 1. Data encryption using DES algorithm

Since encryption is a very heavy process, hardware accelerators are often employed in order to achieve desirable throughput and latency.

The public key encryption bottleneck

While at a first glance it may seem that symmetric encryption, used to encrypt all of the data, is the bottleneck in encryption technology, this is not the case.
As the Figure 1 shows, DES encryption becomes significant only when the transaction size is relatively large, a situation not typical to eCommerce transactions (credit card number and associated credentials require less than a hundred bytes).

Figure 2. Data encryption using AES algorithm

The situation becomes even clearer with the rapid acceptance of AES, a new symmetric encryption standard that has 6 times the performance of Triple DES, and makes symmetric encryption overhead even less noticeable (see Figure 2).
The bottom line: The bottleneck for eCommerce is the public key encryption process.

CipherActive's technology

CipherActive provide a solution for this bottleneck by accelerating public key encryption(see Figure 3). The acceleration is not achieved by a new encryption algorithm, but rather by accelerating standard public key encryption algorithms such as RSA and Diffie-Hellman. As a result CipherActive's implementation has no security impact and is fully inter-operable with other implementations of public key encryption algorithms.

Figure 3. CipherActive's accelerated algorithms

The acceleration is achieved by employing a new algorithm for performing modular reduction. Modular reduction is a computing intensive function that is used by all widely used public key encryption algorithms including RSA, DSA, Diffie-Hellman, Elgamal and elliptic curve systems. Modular reduction is also used in many cryptoanalytic attacks against encryption algorithms and has many other applications in research in the numbers theory field. The two fastest ways until now to perform modular reduction were Barrett's and Montgomery's, both developed in the early '80s. Barrett's method is faster for numbers with less than 900 bits, while Montgomery's for larger numbers and is therefore the prevailing method today, as key lengths are longer.
CipherActive developed an innovative, patent pending, mathematical algorithm for modular reduction that has superior performance. CipherActive's algorithm is 3 times faster on a Pentium III processor, 4 times faster on a Pentium 4 processor and up to 6 times faster on different RISC and DSP processors.