Bernstein's Speedup of the Rabin-Williams Signature Scheme

Dec 05, 1997

Abstract

Do you surf the Web? Do you think your web browser is slow? Well, it will get a lot slower in the near future when new authentication protocols are added to insure that what you get really came from the site you think it came from. Naturally, the fastest known protocol will be used for this important verification. At present, the fastest one is the Rabin-Williams signature scheme, which requires just one multiplication and one division of large integers. Even this is too slow when several authentications are needed to verify a single page.

A month or two ago, Dan Bernstein invented an authentication protocol which is 15 to 20 times faster than that of Rabin and Williams. We will describe this work.