An area-efficient and low-latency elliptic curve scalar multiplication accelerator over prime field

Abstract

For the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) over prime field, this paper presents an area-efficient and low-latency elliptic curve scalar multiplication (ECSM) accelerator, which supports to process any prime number p ≤ 256 bits. The proposed accelerator is based on a parallel hardware implementation of iterative digit-digit Montgomery multiplication and an optimized data flow architecture for elliptic curve point operations. The proposed design is implemented in Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA. The experimental results show that the proposed architecture occupies 23.7k look-up tables (LUTs) and performs single 256-bit scalar multiplication in 0.56 ms. The area-time product of the proposed architecture is only 13.36. Compared with other state-of-the-art ECSM implementations, the proposed architecture has obvious advantage in terms of the area-time product.