An efficient implementation of the digital signature algorithm

Digital signature schemes are commonly used as primitives in cryptographic protocols that provide other services including entity authentication, authenticated key transport, and authenticated key agreement. A VLSI implementation of the digital signature scheme is proposed in this paper, for efficient usage in any cryptographic protocol. This architecture is based on secure hash function and the 512-bit RSA cryptographic algorithm. The whole design was captured by using VHDL language and a FPGA device was used for the hardware implementation of the architecture. A method to reduce the switching activity of the overall design is introduced. The proposed VLSI implementation of the digital signature scheme achieves a data throughput up to 32 kbit/sec.