PGP in Constrained Wireless Devices, by Michael Brown, Donny Cheung, Darrel Hankerson, Julio Lopez Hernandez, Michael Kirkup, and Alfred Menezes

This paper describes our experience with porting PGP to the Research in Motion (RIM) two-way pager, and incorporating elliptic curve cryptography into PGP's suite of public-key ciphers. Our main conclusion is that PGP is a viable solution for providing secure and interoperable email communications between constrained wireless devices and desktop machines.

The implementation on the RIM pager relies on OpenSSL and the library from the OpenPGP reference implementation by Zerucha. The modified openssl-0.9.4 and OpenPGP sources, including the elliptic curve additions, may be obtained via http://cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/~rim/pager/snapshot.

The OpenPGP reference implementation sources were obtained from www.cryptography.org. Some bugfixes were made (in particular, for alignment errors), and the elliptic curve options were added. The results were tested on Solaris/SPARC, Linux/x86, Windows-9x, Windows NT 4 and the RIM pager.

The test implementation for the RIM Pager was developed as a proof-of-concept and to test the elliptic curve routines within a PGP framework. The user interface is adaquate for someone familiar with PGP. The error-handling (some inherited from the OpenPGP reference implementation) is weak, the application uses too much memory, and some operations are slow. A user manual describing the interface for the RIM pager is available.