Fast Architectures for the \eta_T Pairing over Small-Characteristic Supersingular Elliptic Curves

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the design of fast parallel accelerators for the cryptographic ηT pairing on supersingular elliptic curves over finite fields of characteristics two and three. We propose here a novel hardware implementation of Miller's algorithm based on a parallel pipelined Karatsuba multiplier. After a short description of the strategies that we considered to design our multiplier, we point out the intrinsic parallelism of Miller's loop and outline the architecture of coprocessors for the ηT pairing over F(2m) and F(2m). Thanks to a careful choice of algorithms for the tower field arithmetic associated with the ηT pairing, we manage to keep the pipelined multiplier at the heart of each coprocessor busy. A final exponentiation is still required to obtain a unique value, which is desirable in most cryptographic protocols. We supplement our pairing accelerators with a coprocessor responsible for this task. An improved exponentiation algorithm allows us to save hardware resources. According to our place-and-route results on Xilinx FPGAs, our designs improve both the computation time and the area-time trade-off compared to previously published coprocessors.