A Systematic Review of Fast, Scalable, and Efficient Hardware Implementations of Elliptic Curve Cryptography for Blockchain

Abstract

Blockchain technology entered the enterprise domain under the name of permissioned blockchains and hybrid or verifiable database systems, as they provide a distributed solution that allows multiple distrusting parties to share common information. One drawback of these systems is the overhead added by the cryptographic functions which impacts the throughput in terms of transactions per second and increases the latency of transaction processing. Many of the cryptographic functions and protocols used in blockchains are based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). Unfortunately, ECC operations such as modulo inverse or scalar point multiplication have considerable latency which causes the slowdown of the entire system. In such situations, reconfigurable computing architectures, such as FPGAs, can be used to offload these tasks to overcome the performance loss. This survey analyzes the current state-of-the-art designs and implementations of ECC from a hardware perspective. We use a PRISMA-based approach to filter recent publications and to reduce their number from over 16,000 to only 43 highly relevant designs. In the end, we show that very few designs are able to fulfill all three properties of high performance, scalability, and efficiency.