ECC and Digital Postage Marks - Part 2 PDF Print E-mail
Elliptic Curve Pintsov Vanstone Signatures      This issue of
Code and Cipher focuses on Elliptic Curve Cryptography applied
to address specific industry needs.  The use of ECC-based
signature schemes in the postal industry is not new. Because the
size of the digital signature affects the overall size of the
DPM, ECC-based signatures provide an extremely small, yet highly
secure option. In the “Performance Criteria for Information-
based Indicia and Security Architecture for Open IBI Postage
Evidencing Systems” (2001), the USPS defines support for the use
of ECDSA to generate the digital signatures for DPM.  A typical
ECDSA signature is a 40 byte appendix added to a signed message.
By comparison, the cryptographic overhead of an equivalent DPM
using RSA would add 128 bytes. As shown in figure 1, this would
take up most of the space on the envelope on a small piece of
mail, so a small signature becomes very important.  An even
smaller alternative is the E