On the Efficiency of Fast RSA Variants in Modern Mobile Phones

Abstract: Modern mobile phones are increasingly being used for more services that require modern security mechanisms such as the public key cryptosystem RSA. It is, however, well known that public key cryptography demands considerable computing resources and that RSA encryption is much faster than RSA decryption. It is consequently an interesting question if RSA as a whole can be executed efficiently on modern mobile phones. In this paper, we explore the efficiency on modern mobile phones of variants of the RSA cryptosystem, covering CRT, MultiPrime RSA, MultiPower RSA, Rebalanced RSA and R Prime RSA by comparing the encryption and decryption time using a simple Java implementation and a typical RSA setup.