Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange - From Mathematics to Real Life

This thesis gives an introduction to classical Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange and its variant for elliptic curves. The needed mathematical background is given and the discrete logarithm problem is shortly introduced, but the main focus is on algorithms for modular multiplication and correspondingly for scalar multiplication. The theoretical complexity of the needed IEEE algorithms is analyzed and compared to the experimental results achieved from a small-scale performance evaluation of one cryptographic library that has an implementation of these algorithms. Asiasanat:Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange, Elliptic Curve Cryptography, Modular Multiplication, Scalar Multiplication, Implementation of Public Key Cryptography, Performance Evaluation