Title: A reconfigurable processor for high speed point multiplication in elliptic curves

Authors: Nazar A. Saqib, Francisco Rodriguez-Henriquez, Arturo Diaz-Perez

Addresses: Centre for Cyber Technology and Spectrum Management, National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan. ' Centro de Investigacion y de Estudios Avanzados del IPN., Av. Instituto Politecnico Nacional No. 2508, Mexico, D.F., Mexico. ' Centro de Investigacion y de Estudios Avanzados del IPN., Av. Instituto Politecnico Nacional No. 2508, Mexico, D.F., Mexico

Abstract: This paper presents a generic architecture for the computation of elliptic curve scalar multiplication over binary extension fields. In order to optimise the performance as much as we could, we designed a parallelised version of the well-known Montgomery point multiplication algorithm implemented on a reconfigurable hardware platform (Xilinx XCV3200). The proposed architecture allows the computation of the main building blocks required by the Montgomery algorithm in an efficient manner. The results achieved show that our proposed design is able to compute GF(2¹⁹¹) elliptic curve scalar multiplication operations in just 22 clock cycles at a frequency of about 10 MHz. Moreover, our structure is able to obtain a scalar multiplication in less than 60 µSecs.

Keywords: elliptic curves; cryptography; reconfigurable architectures; finite field arithmetic; high speed point multiplication; digital signatures.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2005.009953

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2005 Vol.1 No.3/4, pp.237 - 249

Published online: 05 Jun 2006 *

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