Apex ED25519 support

Hi! Can the Apex Flex calculate ED25519?
It would be good for a project, but I couldn’t find it anywhere.

2 Likes

No, the NXP P71 chip does not support ECC Edwards curves in hardware. The P71 implements the Java Card 3.0.4 Classic and 3.0.5 Classic APIs, while support for Named Elliptic Curves (see also Oracle) and the Edwards Curve has only been standardized for API 3.1 .

It remains to be seen if future hardware iterations of the NXP chips come with support for these curves.

I theory you can implement the required math and logic for these curves in software (e.g. see GitHub), however these implementations tend to be too slow and insecure for actual use.

2 Likes

The major problem with using software for elliptic curves is that if the math is not constant time, the private key can be compromised.

It’s better to use p-256 than to use an insecure ed25519 implementation.

1 Like