ABSTRACT

At present, most of e-commerce applications are developed using asymmetric cryptography to guarantee the authentication of the involved parties. On the other hand, a growing demand for mobile devices has geared a shift towards mobile e-commerce applications. This paper highlights that the existing authentication protocols, based on RSA asymmetric cryptography, are not appropriate for such devices due to their limitations in computing power, memory capacity, key sizes and cryptographic support. Therefore, an efficient protocol for resource constrained platforms that achieve a level of security similar to the one achieved by the protocols in use today is designed and implemented. This protocol is based solely on Elliptic curve asymmetric cryptography and the results prove that the performance achieved is good compared to RSA.