Decoding message using nRF microcontrollers hardware.

[Krzysztof Cieniawski]

Currently I am developing application which run on nRF52832. In this application I have to decode and encode messages using RSA 2048-bit keys pair. Currently I am using ARM MBED library and software solution. Unfortunately it takes at least 8 s to decode message what is far to much for me. I am curious if changing microcontroller to one with hardware crypto module will make it faster. Could you provide me informations how much it takes to perform encoding and decoding operations or nRF52840 or nRF9160 with hardware module. Assumption here is that encryption is still done with pair of RSA 2048-bit keys.

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi,

The CC310 on the nRF52840 and nRF9160 does support RSA up to 2048 bit, so I expect you will get a decent improvement in performance. You can look at <nRF5 SDK>\examples\crypto\nrf_cc310\rsa\main.c for RSA examples. I do not have any performance numbers at hand but you can take the example and adapt it to your test (same operation, same key size, the same size of data set) so that it can be compared directly with your other numbers.