High-Speed and Secure Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem for Multimedia Applications

Abstract

The last few years witnessed a rapid increase in the use of multimedia applications, which led to an explosion in the amount of data sent over communication networks. Therefore, it has become necessary to find an effective security solution that preserves the confidentiality of such enormous amount of data sent through unsecure network channels and, at the same time, meets the performance requirements for applications that process the data. This research introduces a high-speed and secure elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) appropriate for multimedia security. The proposed ECC improves the performance of data encryption process by accelerating the scaler multiplication operation, while strengthening the immunity of the cryptosystem against side channel attacks. The speed of the encryption process has been increased via the parallel implementation of ECC computations in both the upper scaler multiplication level and the lower point operations level. To accomplish this, modified version of the Right to Left binary algorithm as well as eight parallel multipliers (PM) were used to allow parallel implementation for point doubling and addition. Moreover, projective coordinates systems were used to remove the time-consuming inversion operation. The current 8-PM Montgomery ECC achieves higher performance level compared to previous ECC implementations, and can reduce the risk of side channel attacks. In addition, current research work provides performance and resources-consumption analysis for Weierstrass and Montgomery elliptic curve representations over prime field. However, the proposed ECC implementation consumes more resources. Presented ECCs were implemented using VHDL, and synthesized using the Xilinx tool with target FPGA.