Instruction Set Extensions for Cryptography: The ISEC project is targeted at strenghtening the security of embedded systems by enabling them to handle the workloads of assymmetric cryptographic algorithms in a flexible manner. Our approach involves the design and evaluation of instructions set extensions, which enhance performance of public-key algorithms, while demanding little or no additional resources like silicon area, program memory, working memory and energy. In a radical derivation of the common practice, the use of cryptographic coprocessors is dismissed in favor of small enhancements of the original general-purpose processor.