Hi Chris,
I'd rather not get into the "slow" part, but I'm sure it could be faster. I've just posted to dev-crypto about a projective coordinates patch that may improve things for some curves.

Timing attacks are a big topic, but I think it's fair to say in general that if timing attacks are a concern for your particular application, you should not use BC's EC implementation. At least not without taking steps to mitigate any side-channel.

Having quickly read the paper referred to in the comments ("OpenSSL timing attack you mention" -> http://eprint.iacr.org/2011/232.pdf), it seems the particular attack is not relevant to BC. However, BC does not implement the Montgomery ladder at all, so is vulnerable as described in the Introduction.and in many other papers.

We are, of course, interested in improving this situation, but short on time to do so.

Pete.


On 3/07/2013 1:43 AM, Mankowski, Chris wrote:
I'm comparing the performance of UProve using ECC groups versus Subgroups
and the consensus at the forum below is that the ECC implementation in C#
is too slow, and possibly subject to a timing attack.

Is this a valid concern?

http://security.stackexchange.com/q/38169/396


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