NEC Develops Anonymous Authentication Circuit System

NEC Corp. (NEC) has developed a circuit system that processes large amounts of anonymous authentication transactions at high speed and consumes low amounts of power while protecting both security and privacy.

Currently, secure authentication with digital signatures is used throughout a wide variety of network equipment, including terminals and servers. Digital signature authentication ensures that each user is identified in every transaction. When this technology is used within a cloud environment, large amounts of personal information may be logged and stored on cloud servers, which potentially threatens the privacy of users.

NEC has driven the advancement of research in the field of anonymous authentication through group signature schemes that exclusively verify group membership, without identifying individuals, and the development of LSI for accelerating such cryptographic procedures. However, successful implementation of this technique in a cloud environment is challenged by the high process speeds that are required in order to handle a large number of authentication requests.

In response to these needs, NEC developed an effective, low-power hardware accelerator for processing multiple authentication requests simultaneously. Test results from servers equipped with NEC's accelerator indicate that the authentication processing speed can be increased by more than 10 times, and power consumption can be decreased to less than 1 percent of that required for conventional computation methods using software.

These developments enable highly secure anonymous authentication to be easily provided to locations that include cloud environment data centers and others.

NEC