Efficient Hardware Implementation Of Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange Protocol

Abstract

The aim of the present work is the hardware implementation of the elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key exchange protocol on a reconfigurable circuit of type FPGA at the register-transfer level (RTL). Compared to the standard Diffie- Hellman (DH), based on exponentiation in a finite field, ECDH is known to provide equivalent level of security with lower number of bits used. Reduced bit usage implies less power and logic area are required to implement this cryptographic scheme. This is particularly important in secure embedded system, where a high level of security is required, but with low power consumption. The results show that ECDH can be implemented on FPGA with convincing performances in comparison with other published works