• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.79-87
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• 2005

In e-commerce applications, a public key cryptosystem is an important and indispensible element for the basic security operations such as authentication, digital signaturing, and key distribution. In wired network environments, the public key infrastructure certificate, which is based on X.509 specification, has been widely used. On the other hand, it still remains difficult to use the certificate information in wireless network environments due to the inherent limitations of the hand-held devices such as low computational power and short battery life. In this paper, we facilitate a codesign approach by implementing a software public-key cryptosystem and classifying its internal computation overheads quantitatively using a software profiling technique. Moreover, we propose a method to analyze the profiled data and apply it to the problem of software/hardware partitioning in a codesign approach. As an illustrative example, we analyze the computational overheads of an EC-Elfagamal application and examine a critical computational path.